The Great Debate UK

from MacroScope:

Can Greek public opinion be turned?

So we’ve got the fresh Greek elections we expected and markets, despite the inevitability that we would get here, have reacted with some alarm. European stocks have shed  around 1 percent, and the harbour of German Bunds is pushing their futures price up in early trade. The Greeks will try to form a caretaker government today to see them through to elections expected on June 17.

The key question is whether the mainstream parties can mount a convincing campaign second time around, playing on the glaring contradiction in SYRIZA’s position (no to bailout, yes to the euro) and essentially turning the vote into a referendum on euro membership, which the overwhelming majority of Greeks still support. Don’t count on that. SYRIZA remains ahead in the polls. To be able to pull it off, PASOK and New Democracy will need some help from Europe. There have already been hints from Brussels that if a pro-bailout government is formed, Athens could be given some leeway on its debt-cutting terms. But equally other voices are saying there is no more room for manoeuvre.

France's Francois Hollande used his presidential debut to frame help for Greece within his push for a European growth strategy last night, saying he hoped that could also foster a return to prosperity there. He and Germany's Angela Merkel are due in the United States for a G8 summit at the end of the week where doubtless they will come under heavy pressure to make sure Greece doesn’t bomb out of the euro zone or, if it does, that the effect is contained. Easier said than done. Given a Greek euro exit would probably require rapid concerted reaction from the EU, IMF (to shore up Spain?) and the world’s big central banks (remember the global monetary policy response after the collapse of Lehmans?), planning for that could well be bubbling below the surface at the G8.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde said last night that it was important to be technically prepared for the possibility of Greece leaving the euro zone while Finland’s prime minister said Greek euro exit would not cause the financial mayhem seen in 2008.

As we’ve said before, Greece has some leverage. The IMF, ECB and euro zone governments are holding a lot of Greek debt so have an incentive to keep the  show on the road or face heavy losses if there is a hard default. Of Greece’s 250 billion-plus euros of debt, nearly 200 billion is now held by those public bodies, most of it by the ECB, which could need recapitalizing after that sort of hit, something that would fall back on euro zone governments. It is also hard to see how Europe could avoid propping Greece up even if it did leave the currency club. The calculation for euro zone leaders is whether pouring good money after bad is more or less palatable than taking a big loss on their Greek debt holdings.

On the growth strategy, there are hints that Spain will get more time to hit its 3 percent of GDP budget target, so why not something similar for Greece? PASOK leader Venizelos, the man who negotiated the bailout and who was humiliated in the election 10 days ago, has pressed for three years rather than two to make the cuts required by Greece’s programme. If he got stronger signals from euro zone partners that something like that could happen – and persuaded the electorate that this is the only way to avoid euro exit  -- it’s possible that he and New Democracy leader Samaras could do better second time around. The problem for the markets is that while you can take a reasonable stab at how politicians might act, it’s much harder to read a battered electorate. So they are in for a rocky month.

What is undeniably true is that the piecemeal European growth measures announced so far to revive moribund economies don’t amount to a hill of beans.

Democracy vs. austerity

By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.

Throughout history it has always been difficult to take something away from someone once you have given it to them. Europe is finding that it is extremely difficult to reign in public finances once they start to go out of control. Democracies don’t like to vote for austerity, which is why Sarkozy lost the Presidency in France, why a radical left party came second in the Greek elections and why the Conservatives got a drubbing at last week’s local elections in the UK.

This tells us something about democracy in the western world. Governments have to manage the public finances directly – they have to sell the debt, do the sums and present budgets. However, the people who vote them into (and out of) power are the public, who rightly in most cases, believe they have worked hard, paid  taxes and deserve the services and retirement promises made to them.

So here we have the problem: some governments in the West have unsustainable debt loads and deficit levels and yet they don’t have the popular mandate to try and bring that under control. That isn’t the story all over the west. The Germans and the Dutch agree that the government books should be balanced. But if you asked the rest of Europe if they wanted to reduce public debt levels to make country finances more sustainable at the expense of public services and jobs, the recent election results suggest that you would get a resounding no.

So there isn’t one unified way of thinking about austerity in the West. Some people see it as a virtue, others as a type of hell. So what to do? Europe’s one-type fits all model that is largely designed by Germany could lead to social disorder and radical political parties grabbing the reins of power in Greece. However, the more people fight against austerity the more unlikely it is that their governments can attract enough investors to buy their debt to fund their public spending needs.

So where does this vicious circle end? The answer is that no one knows. Now that the true state of public finances in Europe has been revealed it can’t be brushed under the carpet and the Greeks et al can’t go back to the pre-2007 ways of living and spending. However, the opposite – harsh austerity designed to reign in public finances at half the time it took to amass the debt in the first place – isn’t working either.

A more sensible plan is for Europe to reach some sort of compromise. Germany and Greece (as the two extremes) need to realise there are multiple views about what a democracy should provide and how public finances should be controlled. The next step is to plan a fiscal pact that allows countries to reign in public spending at the same pace as it amassed it in the first place – and fiscal targets should be spread out over 10 years rather than the current demands to bring down deficits to 3 percent of GDP by the next fiscal year. The UK could probably follow suit and realise that the debts took two parliaments to accumulate, thus it should take two parliaments to rein them in.

from MacroScope:

The Law of Diminishing Greeks

The Law of Diminishing Returns  states that a continuing push towards a given goal tends to  decline in effectiveness after a certain amount of effort has been expended. If this weren't the case, Usain Bolt would be able to run the mile in  less than 2-1/2 minutes.

From an economic standpoint, this law now seems to be fully in force in Greece. The latest jobs figures from the twice-bailed out euro zone country paint a bleak numerical picture of the impact of unrelenting austerity in ordinary Greeks, regardless of whether it was self-inflicted or not. To wit:

More than one in five Greeks is unemployed.

There are more young people without a job than with one.

The record 1.08 million people  without work in January was a  47 percent tumble  in a year.

Putting aside for the moment the question of what such a condition means for political dissent, there is now the issue of whether any of this austerity-fueled pain is actually helping the Greek economy.

Austerity mixed with the inability of euro-tied Greece to devalue its currency  means  Greece is now in its fifth year of recession. As for job-creating small and medium -sized businesses, the latest projections are that more than a net 130,000 of them will have shut down over two years by the time 2012 is over.

The biggest example of the Law of Diminishing returns, however, is the impact all this is having on what ails Greece in the first place -- its budget.

Unemployed people offer no revenue to the government in terms of income tax and far less in sales tax than they would if they were working.

Spain, Italy and Greece are miracles waiting to happen

By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.

Last November, at the time of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Autumn Statement, the two men in charge of our fiscal and monetary policy together delivered the gloomiest peacetime message in our history. Those of us who have been pessimistic all along were totally outflanked.

The governor of the Bank of England was absolutely right to decry the sudden vogue for technocracy. As he says, the problems in Europe are not fundamentally about a shortage of liquidity, as many commentators suggest and as politicians are only too happy to agree. They are at root about solvency, about the ability and the willingness of countries like Greece to pay their debts, and as such they are political problems which require political solutions. It is simply wishful thinking to imagine that an economics PhD somehow provides access to the secret of how to balance the books of a society which has long been living beyond its means, as have the majority of euro zone members. If it is hard for a Government with a sound electoral mandate to deliver painful medicine, it is likely to be even harder for one with no mandate at all.

Far from being evidence of maturity, the way the political class in Greece and Italy has given way to technocrats is a total abdication of responsibility. What needs to be done to transform the prospects of Greece and Italy, Spain and Portugal involves no rocket science. No advanced macroeconomic theory is needed to get the basics right: to cut Government spending, introduce honest tax collection (especially in Greece and Italy), privatise and deregulate transport systems and utilities, and most importantly to allow labour markets to function properly so as to reduce unemployment to a minimum, rather than to maximise it, as they do at the moment.

If this prescription sounds familiar, so it should. Britain’s situation in 1979 was not unlike that of the ClubMed countries today, with the sole, critical difference that we had been able to print our own money – which we did aplenty in the 1970’s, generating inflation as high as 25 percent by the middle of that awful decade. In the end, the situation was salvaged not by an economist, but by Mrs Thatcher, armed with nothing better than the Micawberish economics of her father’s Grantham grocery.

By contrast, Italy had a professor of economics, Romano Prodi, as Prime Minister from 1996 to 1998 and again from 17 May 2006 to 8 May 2008, but he achieved very little in the way of reform.

Look at the first two columns in the table below, which give indicators of the scale of economic distortion: the Transparency Index, which focuses mainly on the extent of corruption, and the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, which attempts to measure the freedom of the corporate sector to fulfil its function of creating wealth and jobs. No West European country should ever be outside the top 30 on either index, and the rankings for Greece and Italy – behind many Third World countries (and not only in SE Asia) – ought to have shamed them and the E.U. into action a long time ago.

from The Great Debate:

A good deal for Greece, its creditors, and Europe

Amid all the doom and gloom about Greece in the last few weeks, it is easy to overlook an important piece of good news: the debt exchange offer published by Greece on Friday with endorsement by its main private and official creditors. If implemented, this would be a major achievement and an important step toward overcoming the euro zone crisis, almost regardless of what happens next.

Under the offer, bondholders would receive 15 percent of the face value of their bonds in the form of short-term European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) bonds, plus a set of new Greek sovereign bonds maturing between 2023 and 2042, with a 31.5 percent face value.

This agreement is a very good deal for Greece. The combination of the cut in face values, lower coupons and (in most cases) longer maturity implies a debt reduction of about 60 percent in present value terms (evaluated at a 5 percent discount rate). Assuming high participation (about €200 billion in bonds), this translates into savings of about €120 billion, or 54 percent of Greece’s 2011 GDP. This is very large. By comparison, the Argentine exchange of January 2005, the previous high-water mark, generated present value of debt relief of only about 29 percent of GDP, because although the per-dollar debt reduction was higher, the volume exchanged was much smaller.

Private creditors are also getting a good deal. Although they are being hit hard, they could have done much worse. You will see claims that the “haircut” suffered by creditors is on the order of 75 percent. These are exaggerated, because they compare the present value of the new bonds with the face value of the old bonds. But in a pre-default debt exchange, creditors never have the right to full immediate repayment. They only have the right to keep their old bonds and expect them to be serviced.

A better way to determine the value of the new bonds is to compare them with the present value of the old bonds, assuming they both are subject to the same default risk. This leads to a haircut of about 65 percent -- much less than what creditors would have lost in a disorderly default. And it does not reflect two additional benefits: “GDP warrants” that may deliver extra payments beginning in 2015, depending on the level of Greece’s GDP; and an effective upgrade in creditors' rights compared with those of the old bonds. The new bonds will be issued under English law, making them harder to restructure again in the future, and their repayments will be linked to repayments to the EFSF.

Finally, the agreement is a good deal for Europe -- not because it guarantees a good outcome, but because it takes some really bad outcomes off the table. The risks of the new EU-IMF package for Greece are well-known: It assumes a large and protracted reform effort in an economically depressed country where both politicians and the “troika” are deeply unpopular and social tensions are high and rising. And even if the debt exchange is successful, Greek debt will remain very high. Yet the proposed debt exchange and the program that underlies it differ fundamentally from previous instances of “kicking the can down the road.”

Take the worst-case scenario: Following the debt exchange, the program goes offtrack in just a few months, and Greece is cut off from any further borrowing. This would aggravate Greece’s economic downturn and force it into even more austerity to avoid running a primary deficit. But it would no longer lead to a catastrophe. Assuming high participation in the exchange, Greece would face almost no net debt repayments in 2012 and just €1.25 billion in interest payments on the new bonds in 2013. Hence, it would not need to default, let alone leave the euro. Furthermore, Greece would no longer represent a contagion threat, and with a recapitalized banking system, and little or no remaining government deficit, it could likely manage its crisis on its own -- at least until large repayments to official creditors begin to fall due in 2014.

Germany should be happy to let Greece go

When the Greek crisis began, there was much talk of contagion as the greatest short-term risk. In my view, this worry is almost irrelevant because bondholders are in any case facing a haircut of over 70%, so the question of default or bailout is now merely a technical detail.

From a longer term perspective, there is also little reason for the Germans to panic over a Greek default, even if it ultimately leads to the disintegration of the euro zone. The line peddled by a number of commentators and politicians that Germany has “done very well out of the euro zone” begs the question of how well it would have done without the euro zone, a question to which I do not know the answer – but nor does anyone else.

The implicit or explicit claim is that, with floating exchange rates, German trade would have suffered as the DM appreciated against the currencies of its neighbours. This is nonsense, a case of how, in the world of popular economics – what one colleague famously called D-I-Y economics – exchange rates occupy a position of exaggerated importance (If those who study the subject were given the same importance, I’d have had a peerage by now).

If exchange rate appreciation were so damaging and depreciation so beneficial to a country’s trade, the Swiss would by now be the poorest country in Europe and the Italians the richest. The reality is that, while there may be short term dislocations, the effect of changes in the value of a currency are ephemeral. Devaluations are self-defeating because they push up costs until the country’s terms of trade are back where they started, and the opposite for appreciations: a rise in the value of a country’s currency makes its imports cheaper, reducing its inflation rate and restoring its competitiveness as time passes. The process of adjustment seems to take some six or seven years, which might seem a window of opportunity worth seizing for opportunistic devaluation. The fly in the ointment, however, is that the more rapidly a currency depreciates, the more agents in the economy wise up and start anticipating the next depreciation, speeding up the adjustment and thereby narrowing the window of opportunity for exporters.

In other words, exchange rate flexibility smoothes the road, but does nothing whatever to change the destination. Moreover, the effect of exchange rate changes is smallest for countries with the most efficient labour markets, which includes Germany ever since its reforms of ten years ago, so there is every reason to suppose that it would adjust quickly anyway, just as it did in the 1970’s and 1980’s when the DM rose in value almost continually without seriously damaging the country’s competitiveness.

As far as Greece is concerned, making it competitive inside the euro zone will require a so-called internal devaluation – mainly a reduction in wages – whereas outside the euro zone a relaunched drachma could be allowed to float downward. The only difference is that in the former case, Greek workers will have to get by on fewer Euros than they have been used to, whereas outside the euro zone they would be paid in devalued drachmas, which would mean a cut in their living standards of the same order of size (is there such a thing as a Hobson’s Choice between Scylla and Charybdis?).

For Germany (and for the rest of Europe, including Britain), the real danger is that euro zone disintegration might be followed by the collapse of the single market, the only truly valuable component of the EU edifice. As a nation very reliant on its external trade, Germany needs market access – no reasonable person wants to go back to a world of protectionism, quotas and  non-tariff  barriers to trade, but it is an ever-present threat as populist politics take hold in Europe. But even then, the German carmakers have demonstrated in the last couple of years how capable they are of compensating for sales lost in Europe by higher volume in the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America, and there is every reason to suppose that the formidable German capital goods sector will prove just as adaptable.

A funny sort of Union

The pictures from Athens at the weekend showed a city in turmoil: protests turned violent, buildings were alight and an anti-German feeling was clear for all to see. German flags have been burnt as Greek politicians have agreed to yet more austerity, which means reduced pensions, a 20% cut to the minimum wage and mass layoffs in the public sector.

Added to that the EU has demanded that Greek politicians from both sides of the political aisle sign a pledge to implement cuts regardless of the outcome of the general election scheduled for April. Thus, even if the Greek people vote for an alternative to cuts the troika will insist on them.

But while the Greeks protested at this loss of sovereignty the financial markets have been surprisingly calm. While Greek politicians have been in the throes of austerity, negotiations the bond markets in Italy, Spain and Portugal have continued to recover and apart from a slight blip at the end of last week, euro-based risk assets have continued to rally. Added to this, those calling for the end of the euro have been frustrated by the resilience of the single currency.

So does this mean that the markets will have a delayed reaction to what is going on in Athens, or does Greece not matter anymore? I tend to lean towards the latter. That doesn’t mean that no one cares about Greece or her citizens – the pictures at the weekend were truly disturbing – it’s just that in terms of the euro zone crisis, what happens in Athens is not such an important part of the equation anymore.

A trader I know put it this way: rather than spook the markets, the current events in Greece may spur Italy, Portugal and Spain to act to meet fiscal targets and implement structural reform. After all, it shows just how harsh the Troika can be if you repeatedly fail to live up to expectations when it comes to fiscal consolidation.

An Italian tax crackdown has already yielded positive results. A recent article in the New York Times reported that Rome’s tax police swooped on a small workshop near the Vatican that sold religious souvenirs but failed to pay the Italian Revenue its share. Other arrests have been made in ski resorts and high profile nightclubs around the country. The warning is clear: if you live in Italy, drive a Ferrari and report earnings that could hardly pay for a Fiat Punto then the tax police are coming to get you.

Fraud in Italy is said to be worth 255-275 billion euros a year by some estimates. Thus, stories of raids on the rich and famous not only catch the public’s imagination, but are also a way for Italy to score brownie points from Germany.

Hungary: The Greece of Eastern Europe

By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.

It used to be Greece that was the canary in the coal mine, these days it’s Hungary. The new year got off to a bad start for the Eastern European nation after it experienced a failed bond auction, causing its bond yields to surge.

This caused major jitters across global financial markets and once again a small, relatively unknown economy is dominating the headlines and causing a massive headache for the European authorities.

But while there are many similarities, the reasons for the panic in Hungary’s debt markets are different from Greece’s problems. Athens borrowed too much and public spending spiralled out of control. However, Hungary’s problems were not based on the size of its budget deficit, which was a fairly manageable 4.2 percent of GDP at the end of 2010, but the amount of debt in its public and private sector that was denominated in foreign-currency.

While the post-Communist era in Hungary helped to modernise the state, its capital markets did not keep up to date. Borrowing costs were lower in the euro zone and other parts of Europe where banks were willing to lend relatively cheaply across the Eastern European bloc, especially to Hungary. While the Hungarian forint was strong it was fine to have liabilities in euro and Swiss franc, however, since the start of 2011 the forint has deteriorated at a rapid pace. Since August alone the forint has lost more than 17 percent of its value against the euro.

Here is the problem: when your liabilities are in euro but you earn forint, all of a sudden servicing your debts becomes much more expensive and bad debts start to rise.

That’s where the similarities with Greece start. If bad debts start to rise then Austria and Italy could be on the hook. Austrian banks hold a whopping $40 billion of Hungarian liabilities, while Italian banks have a slightly more manageable $20 billion.

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.

from Hugo Dixon:

Chaotic catharsis

Chaos, drama and crisis are all Greek words. So is catharsis. Europe is perched between chaos and catharsis, as the political dramas in Athens and Rome reach crisis point. One path leads to destruction; the other rebirth. Though there are signs of hope, a few more missteps will lead down into the chasm.

The dramas in the two cradles of European civilization are similar and, in bizarre ways, linked. Last week's decision by George Papandreou to call a referendum on whether the Greeks were in favor of the country's latest bailout program set off a chain reaction that is bringing down not only his government but probably that of Silvio Berlusconi too.

The mad referendum plan, which has now been rescinded, shocked Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy so much that they threatened to cut off funding to Greece unless it got its act together -- a move that would drive it out of the euro. But this is probably an empty threat, at least in the short term, because of the way that Athens is roped to Rome. If Greece is pushed over the edge, Italy could be dragged over too and then the whole single currency would collapse. So, ironically, Athens is being saved from the immediate consequences of its delinquency by the fear of a much bigger disaster across the Ionian Sea.

Italian bond yields, which were already uncomfortably high, shot up after the Greek referendum fiasco. Berlusconi was forced to pacify Merkel and Sarkozy at the G20 meeting in Cannes by agreeing to a parliamentary confidence vote on his government's lackluster reform program as well as to monitoring by the International Monetary Fund. The humiliation in Cannes, where Berlusconi's finance minister pointedly failed to back him, could be the final nail in the PM's coffin.

The end of the Berlusconi and Papandreou eras should, in theory, be a cause for celebration. Although the Italian PM's behavior has been scandalous, whereas the Greek PM's has not been, they have both led their countries deeper into debt. They are also both members of political castes that have enfeebled their nations for many years. Getting rid of them could be the start of a renewal process.

The snag is that it's not certain that what comes next will be better. In both countries, where I have spent much of the last fortnight, the best outcome would be national unity governments committed to rooting out corruption and cutting back overgenerous welfare states. This could happen either before or after snap elections. Unfortunately, the old political castes die hard. They could continue bickering over who suffers the most pain and who gets the top jobs until they are staring into the abyss -- or even fall in.