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:
Emerging markets facing current account pain
Emerging markets may yet pay dearly for the sins of their richer cousins. While recent financial crises have been rooted in the United States and euro zone, analysts at Credit Agricole are questioning whether a full-fledged emerging markets crisis could be on the horizon, the first since the series of crashes from Argentina to Turkey over a decade ago. The concern stems from the worsening balance of payments picture across the developing world and the need to plug big funding shortfalls.
The above chart from Credit Agricole shows that as recently as 2006, the 34 big emerging economies ran a cumulative current account surplus of 5.2 percent of GDP. By end-2011 that had dwindled to 1.7 percent of GDP. More worrying yet is the position of “deficit” economies. The current account gap here has widened to 4 percent of GDP, more than double 2006 levels and the biggest since the 1980s. The difficulties are unlikely to disappear this year, Credit Agricole says, predicting India, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Vietnam, Poland and Romania to run current account deficits of over 4 percent this year.
Some fiscally profligate countries such as India may have mainly themselves to blame for their plight. But in general, emerging nations after the Lehman crisis were forced to embark on massive spending to buck up domestic consumption and offset the collapse of Western export markets. For this reason, many were unable to raise interest rates or did so too late. As the woes of the Turkish lira and Indian rupee showed last year, the yawning funding gap leaves many countries horribly exposed to the vagaries of global risk appetite.
There are some supportive factors however. The Fed’s signal this week that U.S. interest rates are unlikely to rise before 2014 shows that central banks in Europe and the United States will continue to gush money for now. So there should be enough cash available to plug the gaps in emerging nations’ balance sheets. Second, as growth eases, so will the deficits. For these reasons, Credit Agricole says the market will be forgiving of large current account deficits this year. But it warned:
What will happen once (developed market) rates are raised is another story, and emerging markets would better have fixed their main imbalances when the global monetary normalisation begins.
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.
Iceland: slipping again?
Just when you thought it was all over, Iceland looks like it’s in trouble again. The cost of insuring Iceland’s debt against restructuring or default has risen this week to 720 basis points in the five-year credit default swap market, its highest since mid-2009. That means it costs 720,000 euros a year for five years to insure 10 million euros of Icelandic debt against default.
Icelanders are to vote by March 6 on a deal to repay $5 billion lost in online Icesave bank accounts in Britain and the Netherlands. Those governments compensated savers when the bank collapsed and now want their money back from Reykjavik, but opinion polls show voters are likely to reject what are seen as the harsh terms of the agreement.
The uncertainty has driven debt insurance costs back up towards the levels seen just before the country’s banking system and government collapsed in Oct 2008.
The government doesn’t have to worry too much yet, as it has a $10 billion international aid pakcage, and no major debt maturing before 2011, when a 1 billion euro bond expires.
But if the IMF doesn’t like the look of the way the political mood is turning and decides to withhold funds, the country will find it hard to pay up.
“The main problem (Icesave) poses to Icelandic public finances is that the British and Dutch governments have enough political clout to block any financial aid to Iceland, be it from the IMF, Scandinavia or the EU, unless the issue has been solved,” said analysts at Icelandic bank Arion (formerly New Kaupthing) in a research note.
Iceland’s troubles once had the power to move other markets, given the amount of speculative capital tied up in its high-yielding markets. With capital controls on its currency, that is no longer the case.
