The Great Debate UK

from Bethany McLean:

The euro zone’s self-inflicted killer

By Bethany McLean The opinions expressed are her own.

There were a lot of things that were supposed to save Europe from potential financial Armageddon. Chief among them is the EFSF, or European Financial Stability Facility.

In the spring of 2010, European finance ministers announced the facility’s formation with great fanfare. In its inaugural report, Standard & Poor's described the EFSF as the “cornerstone of the EU’s strategy to restore financial stability to the euro zone  sovereign debt market.”  The facility itself said in an October 2011 date presentation that its mission is to “safeguard financial stability in Europe.”

That of course hasn’t happened. And the evidence suggests that the EFSF may have only exacerbated the problems.

In theory, the facility is supposed to provide a way for a country that the market perceives as weak to still borrow money on good terms. The initial idea was that instead of the financially troubled country itself trying to sell its debt to live another day, the EFSF would be the one to raise the money and lend it to the country in question. The logic was simple: country X might be shaky, but the EFSF deserved a triple-A rating.

For all of its would-be financial firepower, the EFSF isn’t much to see—it’s just an office in Luxembourg with a German-born economist CEO named Klaus Regling, who oversees a staff of about 20. Its power—and that rating—is derived from the assumption that any debt it issues is guaranteed by the members of the euro zone. Initially, each member pledged unconditionally to repay up to 120% of its share of any debt the EFSF issued. (A country’s share is determined by the amount of capital it has in the European Central Bank.)

On paper, it all sounded great. The reality is that the EFSF wasn’t meant to be an active institution; it was supposed to be a fire extinguisher behind glass: never to be used. “The EFSF has been designed to bolster investor confidence and thus contain financing costs for euro zone member states,” wrote Standard & Poors in its initial report granting the triple A rating. “ If its establishment achieves this aim, we would not expect EFSF to issue a bond itself.”  Moody’s, for its part, wrote that the EFSF “reflects the political commitment of the euro zone member states to the preservation of the euro and the European Monetary Union.” That show of commitment alone was supposed to be enough to reassure the market.

Put the euro zone out of its misery

By Laurence Copeland. The author is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.

Let me make a wild guess – just a hunch, a vague feeling, the kind you get when you hear a football club chairman say “the manager has my full support”. My forecast is that the IMF monitors currently poring over the Italian government’s books will uncover a black hole somewhere, probably one big enough to swallow the euro zone, and the discovery will leave them as shocked as Captain Renault when he found there was gambling going on at Rick’s Bar in Casablanca.

My gut feeling is based on a deeply rooted suspicion of Italian statistics dating back to the early 1970’s, when I got my first job in academic life, as a research assistant in the University of Manchester. In that more tranquil era, it seemed possible to uncover a number of stable relationships between macroeconomic variables for all the other countries in the industrial world, but somehow never for Italy, which was always the outlier. Suspicion of the data is reinforced by the well-established claim that as much as 25 percent of Italy’s production is in the economia sommersa, the underground economy, exempt from taxation, unmonitored and unregulated (in fact, the Italian authorities have sometimes seemed to take a pride in its size, notably in 1987, when by a sleight of the statistician’s hand, Italy’s GDP was deemed to have overtaken that of Britain, thanks to an overnight reassessment of the scale of the country’s black market).

Even if Italy’s predicament is no worse than it appears from official statistics, the outlook is grim. It is hard to imagine a Berlusconi-led government successfully enforcing a serious austerity regime, but neither is it likely that an opposition dominated by ex-Communists could succeed where he failed. Moreover, as with Greece, those who are enthusiastic for a non-partisan administration made up of technocrats forget that mustering support in parliament is not enough. Restoring Italy to fiscal health will need a government able and willing to enforce spending cuts, raise taxes (or at least collect them more vigorously) and deregulate labour markets in the face of bitter and potentially violent opposition from trade unions, the professions and probably much of the public. It is not obvious to me that a government of supposedly neutral technocrats is better placed to achieve all this.

With a total debt of nearly two trillion euros, even a relatively modest haircut for Italy would be ruinously expensive to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), and a Greek-style coiffure of 50 percent or more would use up all the additional funding promised (but not yet delivered). Moreover, there would be devastating consequences for the creditworthiness of the core countries — France in particular, but even Germany, and of course for all the major European banks.

For months now, commentators have been urging the EU authorities finally to get ahead of the curve, something they have repeatedly failed to do in the case of Greece. They began by refusing to admit the need for a bailout, then denied the inevitability of a partial default, then were forced to recognise the need for a 20 percent haircut, and have now been reduced to begging Greece to accept a 50 percent writedown, an offer which will still leave the country facing a crippling debt-to-GDP ratio for a decade or more and which may be rejected anyway — in which case we will end up with a disorderly default after all.

The same sort of slow-motion trainwreck with Italian debt will sink Europe’s (and possibly the world’s) banking system – yet the authorities in Brussels and Frankfurt seem set on that course. To those who ask whether we face another Lehman Brothers, the answer is yes – and probably worse than in 2008.