Back in 2000, the European Central Bank’s first president, Wim Duisenberg, explained how he knew the Bank’s operational framework for implementing monetary policy was working well.  It was, he said, successfully “steering short-term market interest rates” where the Bank wanted them to go.  Prior to the financial crisis, that was indeed the case: the ECB’s policy rate was tightly connected to important short-term interest rates, such as the 3-month government borrowing rate.  In a growing swath of the eurozone, however, this is no longer the case.  As the figures above show, the correlation between the ECB’s policy rate and actual government borrowing rates in Spain, Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal has plummeted since the ECB began its debt-buying program.  The market’s view of default risk on eurozone government debt has increasingly come to dominate these rates, which themselves strongly influence borrowing rates in the private sector.  By Duisenberg’s criterion, monetary policy in the eurozone is becoming less and less effective.  The only thing that will reverse this trend is a resolution of Europe’s growing bank and government debt crisis.  Yet by continually insisting that debt restructuring is out of the question, the ECB is only delaying such a resolution – and almost surely making it more costly.

Read more »

In the midst of the financial crisis of 2008, governments helped to prevent bank runs by guaranteeing bank debts. Yet as sovereign solvency itself becomes an issue, such guarantees quickly lose their value. If Ireland provides a rule of thumb, bank runs can be expected once sovereign credit default swap yields pass 3%. The figure above shows that when Irish government CDS yields first passed 3% in early 2009, foreign deposits fled the country. This happened again in late 2010. Now that Spanish CDS yields have broken the 3% threshold, there is reason to be concerned about the stability of Spanish bank deposits as well. Read more »

The EU-IMF Irish bailout gives Ireland a window of opportunity to solve its problems, but how large a window is it? Although the €85 billion headline number appears to be very large, at over 50% of Irish GDP, the funds must be benchmarked against what they are being earmarked for. €50 billion is tagged for public finances, which will cover two years of public debt refinancing and deficits. This provides a significant window for Ireland to achieve fiscal improvement. However, the window provided by the €35 billion tagged for banking sector recapitalization is much smaller. Over €34 billion of foreign deposits fled Irish banks in September 2010 alone. Over the past two years, Irish banks’ balance sheets have shrunk by over 9%, while their funding reliance on the European Central Bank has increased from 5% to 9% of total liabilities. This suggests that any Irish bailout plan, to be credible enough for the markets, must ensure that the Irish government ceases adding bank debt to its public debt. That will almost surely involve a restructuring – that is, a significant partial default – on the bank debt. Such a restructuring, however, will raise a slew of new bailout questions, since German, French, British and other European banks holding Irish bank debt may themselves require public assistance to remain acceptably capitalized. Read more »

Turkey’s exports to the Middle East have grown substantially over the last three years, particularly to Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Iran. In tandem, its share of exports directed to the European Union has declined. This shift is being driven primarily by the faster growth of Turkey’s Middle Eastern trading partners, but also by a conscious Turkish political decision to cultivate such ties. Prime Minister Erdogan recently said he expected a proposed preferential trade agreement with Iran to lead to a tripling of bilateral trade within five years. While the EU remains a major Turkish trade partner, its declining relative economic importance to Turkey can be expected to weaken its political influence over the country. Read more »

The risk of corporate debt is often measured by looking at the spread between its yield and similar ‘risk-free’ government debt. The higher the spread, the greater the risk. However, when government credit comes into question, this spread is no longer suitable as a measure of corporate risk. The spread does, nevertheless, tell a story about relative risk. In Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, a number of sectors have negative corporate spreads, suggesting that firms are either less likely to default than their governments or will have higher recovery rates if they do default. The sector that stands apart as being much riskier than the government is financials. If these governments partially default, the guarantees they have made to the banking system are no longer credible, and the credit losses may be severe. Read more »