Three snapshots for Thursday
The European Central Bank kept interest rates on hold on Thursday. President Mario Draghi urged euro zone governments to agree a growth strategy to go hand in hand with fiscal discipline, but as thousands of Spaniards protested in the streets he gave no sign the bank would do more to address people’s fears about the economy
The divergence between Euro zone countries is starting to impact analyst estimates for earnings. As this chart shows earnings forecasts for Spain and Portugal are seeing more downgrades than Germany or France.
The inflation rate in Turkey rose to 11.1% in April, putting pressure on the central bank to raise interest rates:
Three snapshots for Thursday
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 2,000 to a seasonally adjusted 386,000, the Labor Department said. The prior week’s figure was revised up to 388,000 from the previously reported 380,000.
The four-week moving average for new claims, considered a better measure of labor market trends, rose 5,500 to 374,750.
Brazil’s central bank raised its key interest rate for a fourth straight time on Wednesday as it seeks to rein in persistent inflation, and indicated more rate increases could be on the way soon. This follows a 50bps rate cut from India earlier in the week.
Three snapshots for Tuesday
Argentina’s debt insurance costs rose after the country moved to seize control of leading energy company YPF on Monday, Madrid called the move on YPF, controlled by Spanish company Repsol, a hostile decision and vowed “clear and strong” measures, while the EU’s executive European Commission warned that an expropriation would send a very negative signal to investors. Of the countries in the MSCI Frontier equities universe Argentinian equities are the worst performer this year.
German analyst and investor sentiment rose unexpectedly in April. The Mannheim-based ZEW economic think tank’s monthly poll of economic sentiment rose to 23.4 from 22.3 in March, beating a consensus forecast in a Reuters poll of analysts for a fall to 20.0.
India’s first interest rate cut in three years may be its last for a while. The central bank cut rates on Tuesday by an unexpectedly sharp 50 basis points to boost the sagging economy, but warned there was limited scope for more cuts, with inflation likely to remain elevated and growth on track to pick up, albeit modestly.
Three snapshots for Friday
JPMorgan profit beats expectations:
In China the annual rate of GDP growth in the first quarter slowed to 8.1 percent from 8.9 percent in the previous three months, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Friday, below the 8.3 percent consensus forecast of economists polled by Reuters.
Italian industrial output was weaker than expected in February, falling 0.7 percent after a revised 2.6 percent fall the month before, data showed on Friday. On a work-day adjusted year-on-year basis, output in February fell 6.8 percent, compared to a revised 4.6 percent decline in January.
from MacroScope:
Central bank balance sheets: Battle of the bulge
Central banks across the industrialized world responded aggressively to the global financial crisis that began in mid-2007 and in many ways remains with us today. Now, faced with sluggish recoveries, policymakers are reticent to embark on further unconventional monetary easing, fearing both internal criticism and political blowback. They are being forced to rely more on verbal guidance than actual stimulus to prevent markets from pricing in higher rates.
How do the world’s most prominent central banks stack up against each other? The Federal Reserve was extremely aggressive, more than tripling the size of its balance sheet from around $700-$800 billion pre-crisis to nearly 3 trillion today. Still, the ECB’s total asset holdings are actually larger than the Fed’s – it started from a higher base.
The Bank of England, for its part, went even deeper into uncharted territory, with its assets as a percentage of GDP surpassing the Fed’s. By the same measure, the ECB has overtaken the Bank of Japan, which has been grappling with deflation for some two decades and started from a much higher level.
Taken together, the expansion in reserves is impressive – and speaks to just how deep the global recession proved to be.
Central banks and the next bubble (2)
In the previous bubble blog earlier in the week I wrote that G4 central bank balance sheets are expanding to a whopping 26% of GDP.
In what Nomura’s Bob Janjuah called “Monetary Anarchy”, some analysts worry that central bank liquidity expansion is a timebomb which if/when it explodes would have very negative consequences.
Swiss private bank Lombard Odier, weighing in on the debate, warns that not only has the quality of central bank balance sheets deteriorated, there has been no visible impact on the real economy.
Stephanie Kretz, member of the investment strategy team for private banking at Lombard Odier, points out that a sharp fall in the money multiplier, defined as the ratio of broad money (M3) to the monetary base, means the impact on the real economy has been almost non-existent.
What about the real economy? Ballooning and riskier central bank balance sheets will not generate sustainable growth or reduce unemployment and debt levels, but could well induce at a later stage unintended consequences that include bouts of hyper-inflation, loss of trust in fiat money and loss of central banks’ credibility as to their capacity to maintain strong currencies and stable prices.
The huge increase in the monetary base has not flowed into the real economy, and is sitting in the excess reserves of still reluctant-to-lend banks whilst the world is deleveraging, thus capping the demand for credit.
What happens when a recovery eventually kicks in, interest rates go up, the velocity of circulation of money comes back and real economy is flooded with paper currency that does not correspond to real human production? Monetary base expansion will need to be reversed in large, non-incremental steps if it is to be non-inflationary. This is uncharted territory for central banks and poses significant longer-term policy risks.
How Turkey cut interest rates but didn’t really
How do you cut interest rates without actually loosening monetary policy? Turkey’s central bank effectively did that today.
I wrote this morning that the bank and its boss Erdem Basci were gearing for rate cuts, thanks to the lira’s steady rise (see the graphic) that should help tame inflation later this year (provided the global investment feel remains positive). But I also said a rate cut was unlikely to happen today. I was wrong — and right too. The central bank cut its overnight lending rate by 100 basis points to 11.5 percent while keeping the one-week repo rate — the main policy rate — steady at 5.75 percent.
So why is this not a real cut? Note that the former overnight rate hasn’t been used for over a month. Instead the central bank has been using the “corridor” between the lending and borrowing rates to adjust policy on an almost daily basis. The upper end of the corridor is in fact used more to tighten policy when there is a need to defend the lira, analysts point out. And most importantly, the central bank has already been providing funds at the cheaper 5.75 percent rate.
Morgan Stanley analyst Tevfik Aksoy writes:
This, in our view, did not come as a surprise, and should not be seen as a significant change in the monetary policy stance….The move, in our view, is not monetary easing but an adjustment to changing conditions…..We think that the difference between 12 percent and 11 percent are sufficiently high to stem currency depreciation in case global sentiment turns sour in coming weeks.
According to economist William Jackson at Capital Economics:
Clearly the central bank’s decision is a nod towards the more favourable external financing conditions
Financial repression revisited
At a monetary policy event hosted by Fathom Consulting at the Reuters London office today, former Bank of England policymakers were discussing the pros and cons of “financial repression”.
Financial repression is a concept first introduced in the 1970s in the United States and is becoming a talking point again after the financial crisis, especially with a NBER paper last year written by economists Reinhart and Sbrancia reviving the debate.
In the paper, authors define financial repression as follows:
Historically, periods of high indebtedness have been associated with a rising incidence of default or restructuring of public and private debts. A subtle type of debt restructuring takes the form of “financial repression”.
Financial repression includes directed lending to government by captive domestic audiences (such as pension funds), explicit or implicit caps on interest rates, regulation of cross-border capital movements, and (generally) a tighter connection between government and banks.
Low nominal interest rates help reduce debt servicing costs while a high incidence of negative real interest rates liquidates or erodes the real
Sparring with Central Banks
Just one look at the whoosh higher in global markets in January and you’d be forgiven smug faith in the hoary old market adage of “Don’t fight the Fed” — or to update the phrase less pithily for the modern, globalised marketplace: “Don’t fight the world’s central banks”. (or “Don’t Battle the Banks”, maybe?)
In tandem with this month’s Federal Reserve forecast of near-zero U.S. official interest rates for the next two years, the European Central Bank provided its banking sector nearly half a trillion euros of cheap 3-year loans in late December (and may do almost as much again on Feb 29). Add to that ongoing bouts of money printing by the Bank of England, Swiss National Bank, Bank of Japan and more than 40 expected acts of monetary easing by central banks around the world in the first half of this year and that’s a lot of additional central bank support behind the market rebound. So is betting against this firepower a mug’s game? Well, some investors caution against the chance that the Banks are firing duds.
According to giant bond fund manager Pimco, the post-credit crisis process of household, corporate and sovereign deleveraging is so intense and loaded with risk that central banks may just be keeping up with events and even then are doing so at very different speeds. What’s more the solution to the problem is not a monetary one anyway and all they can do is ease the pain.
Low interest rates and liquidity schemes can’t solve what ails the developed world. Societies must accept that in order to alter their current perilous course they must undergo great change, moving away from entitlements to which they have become accustomed. The alternative is weak economic growth, a loss of competitiveness and negative external balances — a loss of face and place in the global hierarchy.
As if to reinforce the underlying point that the developed world faces a protracted reform period that tests political, economic and social priorities, credit rating firm Standard & Poors’ — not the most popular company in corridors of power over the past year — warned on Tuesday that it may downgrade the debt of “a number of highly-rated” Group of 20 countries from 2015 if their governments fail to enact reforms to curb rising healthcare spending and other costs related to ageing populations.
For Pimco, the political and social resistance to this sort of change is already showing itself to be significant both in Europe and the United States. People clearly don’t want to see pensions and benefits cut but politicians have already grown government and sovereign indebtedness close to their maximum. Accommodative central banks that helped them get there only ended up fueling credit, consumption and housing bubbles and distorting the balance of the economy away from production and into an increasingly bloated financial sector. That, clearly, ended in tears as finance itself needed bailing out and compounded the sovereign debt burden.
So if harder, longer-term choices and reforms are now needed, central banks ability to continually reflate the world economy by monetary means alone is at best uncertain, Pimco argues. The risk of major upheavals along the way in Europe, for example, has the potential for major market volatility and economic seizures.
from Jeremy Gaunt:
Why is the euro still strong?
One of the more bizarre aspects of the euro zone crisis is that the currency in question -- the euro -- has actually not had that bad a year, certainly against the dollar. Even with Greece on the brink and Italy sending ripples of fear across financial markets, the single currency is still up 1.4 percent against the greenback for the year to date.
There are lots of reasons for this. The dollar is subject to its country's own debt crisis, negligible interest rates and various forms of quantitative easing money printing -- all of which weaken FX demand. There is also some evidence that euro investors are bring their money home, as the super-low yields on 10-year German bonds attest.
Finally -- and this is a bit of a stretch -- some investors reckon that if a hard core euro emerges from the current debacle, it could be a buy. Thanos Papasavvas, head of currency management at Investec Asset Management, says:
Let's assume there is some sort of breakup ... if the euro is the currency of a potentially core set of economies, then it would be an incredibly strong currency
Of course, there is the question of whether $1.36 or thereabouts represents a strong euro against the dollar. Lots of people, for example, tend to judge it by the $1.17 rate at which the euro was introduced. But the following graph suggests that if you give the euro a longer historical life, it is not all that much above its average value. Still higher than some might have expected give the crisis that is threatening it entire survival.
