Hungary can seek IMF aid now. But can it cut rates?
The European Union has given Budapest the green light to seek aid from the IMF. (see here) In fact, the breakthrough after five months of dispute does not let Hungary completely off the hook — to get its hands on the money, Viktor Orban’s government will have to backtack on some controversial recent legislation, starting with its efforts to curb the central bank’s independence. It remains to be seen if Orban will actually cave in.
But markets are reacting as if the IMF money is in Hungary’s pocket already. There have been sharp rallies in Hungarian dollar bonds, CDS and currency markets (see graphic below from Capital Economics). The Budapest stock market has posted its best one-day gain since last November while the yield on local 10-year bonds have collapsed almost 100 bps. Hungarian officials are (a bit prematurely) talking of issuing bonds on world markets.
What investors are hoping for now is a cut to the 7 percent interest rate. Hungary’s central bank jacked up rates by 100 bps in recent months to defend the forint as cash fled the country. Now there is a chance those rate rises can be reeled back in. After all, the moribund economy could really use a dash of monetary easing. Thanasis Petronikolos, head of emerging debt at Baring Asset Management has been overweight Hungary and recalls that after 2008 crisis, the central bank was able to quickly take back its 300 bps of currency-defensive rate hikes.
In the aftermath of this, the central bank may be prompted to cut short term interest rates. If the risk premium comes down a lot, the central bank may feel that 7 percent interest rates are not justified. I’m expecting them to at least take this 100 bps back assuming they can reach an agreement with the IMF.
Hungary’s FRAs (forward rate agreement), are still pricing slightly higher short-term interest rates and have not yet reacted to the shifting picture. Many urge caution however on the rate cut expectations, noting that Orban and the IMF may struggle to reach common ground and the central bank will want to see money on the table before it actually acts.
Petronikolos is right in that the economy is moribund, credit growth has slumped and there is a big output gap. But headline inflation is running at 5.5 percent, well above the central bank’s 3 percent target, due to an increase in sales tax. Sandor Jobbagy, at CIB Bank in Budapest is one analyst who says inflation risks have forced him to push back the date of likely interest rate cuts.
Hungary’s plan to get some cash in the bank
Hungary says it might borrow money from global bond markets before it lands a long-awaited aid deal with the International Monetary Fund. That pretty much seems to suggest Budapest has given up hope of getting the IMF cash any time soon. Given the fund has already said it won’t visit Hungary in April, that view would seem correct.
There is some logic to the plan.
Hungary desperately needs the cash — it must find over 4 billion euros just to repay external debt this year.
It is also an attractive time to sell debt. Appetite for emerging market debt remains strong. Emerging bond yield premiums over U.S. Treasuries have contracted sharply this year and stand near seven-month lows. Moreover, U.S. Treasury yields may rise, potentially making debt issuance more costly in coming months.
For Hungary’s government , the idea of a successful bond sale is particularly attractive as this will at a stroke improve its bargaining position with the IMF. That’s bad news, says Tim Ash, RBS head of emerging European research:
The problem is that getting cash in the bank may actually reduce the likelihood of the government actually finally cutting a deal with the IMF, so arguably increases market risk over the slightly longer term.
He concedes however:
Teflon Treasuries?
The pleasant surprise of Friday’s upbeat U.S. employment report rattled the U.S. Treasury bond market, as you’d expect, encouraging as it did some optimism about a sustained U.S. economic recovery, tempering fears of deflation and casting some doubts on the likelihood of another bout of quantitative easing or bond buying by the Federal Reserve. And investors wary of seemingly teflon Treasuries are always keen to use such a backup in U.S. borrowing rates as a reason to rethink a market where supply is soaring and national debt levels are accelerating and where the country has just entered a presidential election year.
The release then by Eurostat on Monday of 2011 government debt levels for the European Union and euro zone — where bond markets have been in chaos for the past couple of years — provided another reason to look sceptically at Treasuries as it showed aggregate EU and euro zone debt more than 10 percentage points of GDP lower than in the United States.
And with no fresh debt reduction plan likely this side of November’s presidential elections, the comparative U.S. debt trajectory over the coming years looks alarming.
Strategists at Societe Generale map the two for effect.
Hungary’s Orban and his central banker
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent central banker?” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban may not have voiced this sentiment but since he took power last year he is likely to have thought it more than once. Increasingly, the spat between Orban’s government and central bank governor Andras Simor brings to memory the quarrel England’s Henry II had with his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, over the rights and privileges of the Church almost 900 years ago. Simor stands accused of undermining economic growth by holding interest rates too high and resisting government demands for monetary stimulus. The government’s efforts to sideline Simor are viewed as infringing on the central bank’s independence.
So far, attacks on Simor have ranged from alleging he has undisclosed overseas income to stripping him of his power to appoint some central bank board members. But the government’s latest plan could be the last straw – proposed legislation that would effectively demote Simor or at least seriously dilute his influence. Simor says the government is trying to engineer a total takeover at the central bank. “The new law brings the final elimination of the central bank’s independence dangerously close,” he said last week. The move is ill-timed however, coming exactly at a time when Hungary is trying to persuade the IMF and the European Union to give it billions of euros in aid. The lenders have expressed concern about the law and declined to proceed with the loan talks. But the government says it will not bow to external pressure and plans to put the law to vote on Friday. That has sparked general indignation – Societe Generale analyst Benoit Anne calls the spat extremely damaging to investor confidence in Hungary. “I just hope the IMF will not let this go,” he writes.
Central banks and governments often fail to see eye to eye. But in Hungary, the government’s attacks on Simor, a respected figure in central banking and investment circles, is hastening the downfall of the already fragile economy. For one, if IMF funds fail to come through, Hungary will need to find 4.7 billion euros next year just to repay maturing hard currency debt. That could be tough at a time when lots of borrowers — developed and emerging — will be competing for scarce funds. Central European governments alone will be looking to raise 16 billion euros on bond markets, data from ING shows. So Orban will have to tone down his rhetoric if he is to avoid plunging his country into financial disaster.
But this week the tussle has intensified as the central bank has shrugged off Orban’s call for more “growth-friendly policies” and raised interest rates by half a point. The rate rise, the second in as many months, brings interest rates to 7 percent, sparking rage in the ruling party. But the central bank, quite logically, argues higher rates are necessary to protect Hungary’s currency, the forint, from further weakness. And it has signalled it is fully prepared to raise rates again at the next meeting if required.
Can Eastern Europe “sweat” it?
Interesting to see that Poland wants to squeeze out more income from its state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector in the face of slowing economic growth and financing pressures.
Warsaw wants to double next year’s dividends from stakes in firms ranging from copper mines to utility providers to banks.
Fellow euro zone aspirant Lithuania has also embarked on reforms aimed at increasing dividends sixfold from what UBS has dubbed “the forgotten side of the government balance sheet”. It wants to emulate countries such as Sweden and Singapore where such companies are managed at arm’s length from the state and run along strict corporate standards to consistently grow profits.
The impetus isn’t entirely ideological. Poland and Lithuania are desperately trying to balance their books and under European Commission rules, privatisation proceeds cannot be taken into account when calculating the budget deficit but SOE dividends can.
But “sweating” government assets to yield higher profits doesn’t always come easy for central and eastern Europe. After all, this is a region where state ownership has been synonymous with inefficiency and stagnation.
Even so, the track record of emerging European governments on privatisation is mixed.
The haste at which state resources were sold off following the collapse of the Soviet Union had disastrous repercussions for economies such as Russia and Croatia. Recent efforts at state divestment from Poland to the Czech Republic to Romania have run aground on unrealistic price expectations, corruption or regulatory obstruction.
Phew! Emerging from euro fog
Holding your breath for instant and comprehensive European Union policies solutions has never been terribly wise. And, as the past three months of summit-ology around the euro sovereign debt crisis attests, you’d be just a little blue in the face waiting for the ‘big bazooka’. And, no doubt, there will still be elements of this latest plan knocking around a year or more from now. Yet, the history of euro decision making also shows that Europe tends to deliver some sort of solution eventually and it typically has the firepower if not the automatic will to prevent systemic collapse. And here’s where most global investors stand following the “framework” euro stabilisation agreement reached late on Wednesday. It had the basic ingredients, even if the precise recipe still needs to be nailed down. The headline, box-ticking numbers — a 50% Greek debt writedown, agreement to leverage the euro rescue fund to more than a trillion euros and provisions for bank recapitalisation of more than 100 billion euros — were broadly what was called for, if not the “shock and awe” some demanded. Financial markets, who had fretted about the “tail risk” of a dysfunctional euro zone meltdown by yearend, have breathed a sigh of relief and equity and risk markets rose on Thursday. European bank stocks gained almost 6%, world equity indices and euro climbed to their highest in almost two months in an audible “Phew!”.
Credit Suisse economists gave a qualified but positive spin to the deal in a note to clients this morning:
It would be clearly premature to declare the euro crisis as fully resolved. Nevertheless, it is our impression that EU leaders have made significant progress on all fronts. This suggests that the rebound in risk assets that has been underway in recent days may well continue for some time.
So what exactly have investors and been doing while waiting for the fog to clear in Brussels? The truth on most benchmark prices and indices is “not very much” — at least not since world markets got the collywobbles in early August about US downgrades and debt ceilings, euro sovereign debt angst and double dip recession. Yet, since the European stocks nadir in late September prodded the Franco-German alliance into more serious action, there has been some impressive market gains of between 10 and 20% across most equity sectors and national indices. More broadly, after a year of intense political and financial turmoil across the globe, developed market equities are only down about 4% year-to-date — a 10 point outperformance on emerging markets, for example.
And the clearing of the euro fog now allows investors to start looking beyond the Brussels cauldron and review how the rest of the world is shaping up. What they find, surprisingly for those drowning in disaster commentaries, is‘not all that bad – especially, but not exclusively in the United States. There’s been a string of more positive economic data releases throughout October and these have continued through the back end of last week and early this week. The bellwether Philadelphia Fed industrial index rose to its highest in six months; U.S. durable goods orders (excluding volatile aircraft orders) rose at their fastest pace in six months in September; U.S. new home sales rose at their fastest in five months; business surveys show Chinese manufacturing is back expanding again in October for the first time in three months; U.S. power firms are reporting a pickup in industrial activity in H2, Ford has increased fourth quarter forecast for North American vehicle production. The U.S. Q3 earnings season hasn’t been half bad either – with a third of the S&P500 reported, some 70 percent beat forecasts and the main strength was in the industrial world. What’s more for markets, seasonal equity flows are typically in an updraft for the rest of the year, all things being equal. Fund managers already started rebuilding equity positions in September.
European business and consumer sentiment surveys have continued to push lower through the policy logjam, unsurprisingly, even if real data contradicts some of that anecdotal ‘evidence’. And this may well translate into the wider investment theme as the euro crisis ebbs. Europe may agree to adapt grudgingly to solve its immediate problem but tyhen pay the price in economic growth because it’s less worse than the alternative of financial chaos.
On the more immediate horizon, there may be groans from those hoping to escape summit mania as G20 leaders are set to meet in Cannes next Thursday and Friday — with a hoped-for endorsement of the euro plan and a specific interest in the EFSF/IMF/SPV idea that seems to be courting sovereign wealth funds from China and other emerging giants from the BRICs to use a special conduit to buy euro sovereign bonds. ECB rate cuts too may be firmly back in the frame on Thursday as Mario Draghi takes the helm of the central bank for the first time. The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee gives us its latest decision on Wednesday. US payrolls looms large on Friday, with a heavy European earnings sked including Barclays, BMW, ING, BNPP, Unilever, CS, ArcelorMittal, RBS, Commerzbank, and many more.
We’re all in the same boat
The withering complexity of a four-year-old global financial crisis — in the euro zone, United States or increasingly in China and across the faster-growing developing world — is now stretching the minds and patience of even the most clued-in experts and commentators. Unsurprisingly, the average householder is perplexed, increasingly anxious and keen on a simpler narrative they can rally around or rail against. It’s fast becoming a fertile environment for half-baked conspiracy theories, apocalypse preaching and no little political opportunism. And, as ever, a tempting electoral ploy is to convince the public there’s some magic national solution to problems way beyond borders.
For a populace fearful of seemingly inextricable connections to a wider world they can’t control, it’s not difficult to see the lure of petty nationalism, protectionism and isolationism. Just witness national debates on the crisis in Britain, Germany, Greece or Ireland and they are all starting to tilt toward some idea that everyone may be better off on their own — outside a flawed single currency in the case of Germany, Greece and Ireland and even outside the European Union in the case of some lobby groups in Britain. But it’s not just a debate about a European future, the U.S. Senate next week plans to vote on legisation to crack down on Chinese trade due to currency pegging despite the interdependency of the two economies. And there’s no shortage of voices saying China should somehow stand aloof from the Western financial crisis, even though its spectacular economic ascent over the past decade was gained largely on the back of U.S. and European demand.
Despite all the nationalist rumbling, the crisis illustrates one thing pretty clearly – the world is massively integrated and interdependent in a way never seen before in history. And globalised trade and finance drove much of that over the past 20 years. However desireable you may think it is in the long run, unwinding that now could well be catastrophic. A financial crisis in one small part of the globe will now quickly affect another through a blizzard of systematic banking and cross-border trade links systemic links.
Just take the euro zone for a start. HSBC economists on Friday said the costs of a euro zone breakup would be “a disaster, threatening another Great Depression” and far outweighed the costs of repairing the flawed fiscal backstops to the monetary union — especially given the wealthier creditor countries within the union tend to ignore the benefits they’ve reaped from the euro over the past 12 years. Aided by the “entangling effects” of the euro, it showing that cross-border holdings of capital have exploded from about 20% of world GDP in 1980 to stand at more than 100% now (global GDP was estimated by the IMF to be about $62 trillion last year). By contrast, the first wave of globalisation in the late 19th and early 20th century saw cross-border holdings peak at 20% of world GDP before WW1 reversed everything.
“A euro break-up would be a disaster, threatening another Great Depression,” wrote HSBC chief economist Stephen King and economist Janet Henry. ” Cross-border holdings of assets and liabilities within the eurozone have risen dramatically, leading to a tangled web of mutual financial dependency. With the re-introduction of national currencies, disentanglement would proceed at a rate of knots, undermining financial systems, generating massive currency moves, threatening hyper-inflation in the periphery and triggering economic collapse in the core.”
That tangled web of trade and finance, however, goes well beyond the euro zone. One of the reasons the fast-growing emerging markets look, for the second time in four years, set to succumb to the western financial crisis is that western banks — European banks in particular — provide them with so much finance. RBC economists, citing data from the Bank for International Settlements, shows outstanding European bank lending to emerging markets at some $3.4 trillion — almost 10 times that of the U.S. banks and more than three times Japanese bank lending.
JP Morgan, meantime, reckons a one percentage point decline in western real domestic spending growth (GDP less net exports) leads to a 2.7 percentage point drop in exports from emerging economies as a whole. If their forecast for a recession in the euro zone and US slowdown to 1 percent annualised growth by the middle of 2012 proves correct, then that should slow EM export growth to 6% annualized in 4Q11 and just 4% annualized in 1H12 from double digit growth rates earlier this year. While that would still be far better than 2008/2009 emerging export collapse of about 20%, the projected pace of export growth would still be weaker than at any point in the expansion of the 2000′s save during the SARS scare.
Additionally, Mr. KnowLittle Writer please do some research on global debt. I have done it and the facts are startling. The lack of protectionism in America has proved to be deadly to this great nation. Something China understands very well, no wonder why it is growing. China is absolute proof of everything I am saying. Until you see the data and comprehend it, you and everyone else who fails to comprehend, will fall very hard and never understanding why.
from MacroScope:
The thin line between love and hate
The opinion on Turkey’s unorthodox monetary policy mix is turning as rapidly as global growth forecasts are being revised down.
Earlier this month, its central bank was the object of much finger-wagging after it defied market fears over an overheating economy by cutting its policy rate. It defended the move, arguing that weaker global demand posed a greater risk than inflationary pressures.
Investors were not persuaded. When I told one analyst about the Turkish rate move, he practically sputtered down the phone: "You're not kidding?!"
The lira sold off, dropping to 2-1/2 year lows against the dollar.
But the central bank could yet be vindicated. With fears intensifying over weakening global demand, its decision to cut rates looks increasingly prescient. As my colleague Sujata Rao has pointed out, other emerging-market central banks have followed the Turks.
Witness Societe Generale’s head of emerging markets strategy Benoit Anne's mea cupla in a note issued just two weeks after Turkey's controversial rate decision:
"I guess I need to apologize to the Central Bank of Turkey which on many occasions had been the object of my sarcasm over the past few months: the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey is actually at the forefront of policy-making in the emerging-markets universe. And I bet some other central banks will follow suit with rate cuts in the pipeline."
EU stress tests: who knows, who cares?
The following is a guest post by Christopher Whalen, senior vice president and managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics. You can also follow him on twitter. The opinions expressed are his own.
Waiting for the results of the EU stress tests, one is reminded of the many times in the past century when the U.S. has rescued the Europeans from their tendency to wage war against one another and go broke in the process. Having now helped to sell the EU banks much of the subprime garbage that sank the likes of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, now the U.S. is offering a solution, namely to mimic the U.S. stress tests of 2009.
The U.S. stress tests, keep in mind, were about restoring confidence, not measuring financial soundness. The assumptions in the U.S. stress tests were soft and virtually all of the banks passed. The U.S. government had already guaranteed the liabilities of most U.S. banks, General Electric and General Motors, and a variety of other formerly non-bank companies. Thus the stress tests are properly seen as an exercise in managing expectations of the bond vigilantes.
The U.S. process was reasonably credible to investors because, despite their many failings, American regulators have a cohesive, if fragmented, approach to gathering data from regulated banks and disclosing same to investors. The data used in the stress tests actually bore some resemblance to public data available on these institutions.
In the EU, on the other hand, there is virtually no transparency on bank financial statements and thus no visibility for investors in terms of making the stress tests credible. There is no SEC in Europe, no EDGAR or FDIC portals on the internet with extensive financial data on banks. There is not even a common template for gathering financial data on European banks or even credit statistics for many EU consumers.
Financial analysts, risk professionals and publishers cannot even obtain basic financial data regarding EU banks without going through enormous trouble and expense. Thus the entire EU stress test process is suspect. And analysts have no way to independently verify either the inputs or the results.
In the U.S., by comparison, data available to regulators makes it possible to benchmark all U.S. banks against the new capital standards and to stress these assumptions. Because of the excellent structured financial data reported quarterly by U.S. banks, and validated and maintained by the FDIC, U.S. regulators may measure and compare the financial compliance of every bank in the U.S. to the post-stress test capital guidelines.
Thank you Chris. Most helpful to understand the European framework of its various financial ‘sub’ systems versus the States.
I could use this as a soapbox against 1. increasing amounts of Fair Value used in US financial reporting especially permitted to be used by agency at our Financial institutions, especially at the Big Financials and running their non cash, ‘market’ gains thru the income statement to give some sort of gravy train to serve as if management is doing a ‘great-job’ to warrant their way over board pay packages, and keep the dividends and/or engage in stock buybacks largely to support aside from capital adequacy concerns, but agency’s self interests because it now too thinks it’s like an ‘owner’ in a bank.
Now many ‘owners’ today don’t understand these financial institutions, or the financial system, let alone understand in spite of agency abuses via the trading of instruments they do not have the capital nor collateral to trade, let alone to write and trade against the resources of the enterprise, it’s our system and we do have to be on top of it, clean it up and not leave it compromised or able to collude with the European Financials so as to cause global financial problems and avoid or shed any consequences, feel a claw-back only of 2008 remuneration, etc.
I suggest we leave the Europeans to their own devices over there, require them to adequately capitalize to run here, which perhaps would encourage them to pack up their tents and call it a day, and stick to their own knitting at home rather than feel some compulsion to collapse the EU economy with more adds to the EU (while looking for us to give $500B to the IMF), with more commercial abuses in their own societies that we should avoid putting ourselves there and even agency avoiding wasting of the banks’ owners resources in places like the PRC.
That Chris reminded us that again, public companies there and the quality of disclosure about their financial status is significantly different enough with very few Americans skilled enough to parse their prose, fluently speak their languages to understand their commercial meanings, and ah, what and how they go about their business and the way we go about ours should be left be. Our heckling them to run or report or abide in the way ours do, puts us at risk for their self interests on us both there and here.
So they can have their Basel, they can have their reporting, they can have their fair value so that they can goose their earnings with their balance sheet management or what have you. It’s bad for us to adopt that, and here to laud or support it among our own, but it also would disserve us to erode to the manner in the way we’ve let the European reporters even to fail to reconcile with US GAAP if those foreign reporters trade over our exchanges. What did we do for the EU to think we’re their back yard and can feudalize us in their way? We weren’t fools to let the oceans and few shrewd men help us to withdraw from the self interests of Europe’s royalty, it’s cadre of high level agents and its bankers.
Our problem is we let our bankers control us and not suffer any consequences for problems of letting people who conceitedly think they’re expert about the money, when they’re not and they’re costing US voters between $10T to $16T in order for the markets to be flush for our bank players to trade and have higher mark to markets flushed by the voters’ wallet. Since that’s the way in Europe, that our money changers had the power to hijack our economy, pull of their enron and the voters risk that agency will have enriched in this plunder with impunity.
At least in Europe, agency there wasn’t paid anywhere near what it is paid here. Here however, we need to stop letting men at the top who have the insight of clerks while paying them huge amounts of money to slam their companies into the wall, like enron, running in negative cash-flow, and using liquidity mechanisms to given them liquidity when we need to fire many of those senior managers or as Chris has said at other times, bring in the parents. It certainly isn’t what Frank and Dodd passed, nor while Derivatives are trading OTC is the problem solved with the wallets of the voters of all the sovereigns are the final backstop in all ISDA agreements. Until this backstop is removed, there or here, nothing holds managements’ feet to the fire. Nothing unless it’s on their own dime. So if there isn’t bailout on the back end that up to this point has impuned agency in its recklessness when the voters’ wallet has been on the back stop in every or any ISDA agreement, removing this should enable agency to stand on its own 2 feet and their well healed shoes and figure out their own way instead of being about as swift and/or as principled as ah, Andy Fastow. or some other time serving miscreant who slammed their company into the wall and got sent to the ‘bighouse’.
from MacroScope:
The nuclear option for financial crises
They finally realised how serious it was. With stock markets tumbling, bond yields on vulnerable debt blowing out and the euro in danger of failing its first big stress test, the European Union and International Monetary Fund came out with a huge rescue plan.
At 750 billion euros (500 billion from the EU; 250 billion from the IMF), the rescue package is the equivalent of taking a huge mallet to a loose tent peg. Add to that an agreement among central banks to help out and the actual purchase of euro zone bonds by Europe's central banks and you turn the mallet into a pile driver.
That tent is not going anywhere for now.
Does this remind anyone of anything? How about a lot of small attempts to stop the subprime/Lehman crisis failing, only to be followed by the likes of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program in the United States?
Is the message here that markets are no longer going to respond to small, incremental attempts to stop crises building and that what they expect now is the nuclear option?
