MacroScope

Since the financial crisis, the federal government has implemented a fiscal stimulus plan and the Federal Reserve took to the road of monetary stimulus, actively seeking new routes to revive the U.S. economy.

The private sector, however, has been laggard in adding its muscle to the revival efforts. Private firms have added employees, but very cautiously, and wages are stagnant. Meanwhile, a huge amount of cash sits idle on corporate balance sheets.

“Capital expenditure plans are being retrenched,” notes Dan Heckman, senior fixed income strategist and senior portfolio manager at Minneapolis, Minnesota-based US Bank, with $80 billion in assets under management. “Most major corporations are sitting on tons of cash. They have no appetite for borrowing and credit line utilization is at all-time lows.”

So what would happen if U.S. corporations, who sometimes return cash to shareholders through share buybacks or special dividends, initiated their own economic stimulus plan, giving a $3,000 bonus to every single one of their employees before year end?

“A corporate bonus wouldn’t be all that different in impact than if the federal government were to do it,” says Dean Baker, economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research. “Presumably the price of the corporation’s stock would fall a little and some people who owned the company’s stock would be a little less wealthy; but the propensity for people to consume out of income would be much greater than for stockholders to consume out of wealth,” he said.

There are signs of headway from Athens where we have just snapped a government source saying the IMF accepts Greek debt is “viable” if it falls to 124 percent of GDP in 2020, rather than the 120 that it had previously decreed was the maximum sustainable level.. The source said fresh measures have been found to reduce debt to 130 percent of GDP by 2020, leaving another 10 billion euros to be covered.

At the latest failed meeting of euro zone finance ministers on Tuesday, we confirmed that the EU/IMF/ECB troika had calculated Greek debt would only fall to 144 percent of GDP in 2020 without further measures, meaning roughly 50 billion euros needed to be knocked of Greece’s debt pile. A report circulated at the meeting concluded (apologies for the number soup) that debt could only be cut to 120 percent of GDP in eight years if euro zone government agreed to take a writedown on their loans, which they will not do for now.

If the IMF will now accept 124 percent as a target that means 20 percentage points of GDP – about 40 billion euros – would have to be lopped off Greece’s debt pile. If they are now only 10 billion short, then measures amounting to 30 billion have been found. It’s hard to believe that could have come from the Greek side which has already slashed to the bone, so maybe some or all of the options we know are on the table — a Greek debt buyback at a sharp discount, lowering the interest rate and lengthening terms on the loans and the ECB foregoing profits on its Greek bondholdings – have been agreed to.

For the Bank of Greece, the euro zone is a bloc of 16 members, rather than the full complement of 17. Although many analysts have tipped  Greece, in the throes of a long recession, to be the first to leave the currency union, it is tiny Estonia that Greece can live without, at least according to the central bank's website.

Estonia, which joined the euro zone at the beginning of last year, seems to have completely slipped by the Hellenic central bank, even though Estonian governor Ardo Hansson has the same, single vote on the European Central Bank's Governing Council as its own George Provopoulos, or even German Jens Weidmann.

"Today the euro area comprises 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain," the Bank of Greece says on its website.

The EU budget summit, which could turn into a marathon as it tries to nail down monies for the next seven years, begins today. With the euro zone repeatedly failing to nail down a Greek deal, the EU would be well advised not to let this negotiation fall apart too. Having said that, there is little sign of great concern in market pricing – presumably the ECB’s pledge to buy government bonds in whatever amount it takes to steady the bloc continues to suppress investor nerves and short sellers.

Net contributors to the budget including Germany, France and Britain want to cut 100 billion euros from the European Commission’s draft budget proposal, but differ over which areas to cut. Meanwhile, the main beneficiaries of EU funding such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic oppose cuts. The meeting is intended to lay the groundwork for political agreement on the budget by EU leaders at their final summit of 2012 in December. It will last two days, maybe more and it could well be that no agreement is reached. Officials say only a cut in real terms – for the first time ever – is likely to do the trick.

Back to Greece and prime minister Samaras will meet Eurogroup chief Juncker in Brussels although he is now largely a passive, angry bystander in this process. While Juncker’s assertion in the early hours of Wednesday morning that a deal was only held up by complex technical matters has some truth to it, there is a far deeper split to be closed.

Sometimes, communication can be the art of what not to say. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke took pains this week to make clear that the central bank’s indication that it will likely keep rates low until mid-2015 does not mean it expects growth to remain weak for that long.

By pushing the expected period of low rates further into the future, we are not saying that we expect the economy to remain weak until mid-2015; rather, we expect – as we indicated in our September statement – that a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the economic recovery strengthens.

The comments speak to a key problem with the notion of calendar-based forward guidance, first adopted by the Fed in August of 2011: each time officials push the date further into the future, they risk dampening financial market sentiment, thereby having the opposite effect to the stimulus it intended.

Federal Reserve policymakers are striving to find common ground as they consider whether to adopt specific numerical thresholds for inflation and joblessness as guideposts for U.S. monetary policy.

Many policymakers think doing so could help clarify how the timing of an interest-rate hike might change in response to shifts in the economic outlook. But others worry that using numerical thresholds could be confusing or misleading.

Arriving at a consensus on what milestones to use and how to communicate the shift away from the Fed’s current guidance that rates will stay low through at least mid-2015 is tricky. Just what are they discussing, and what are the challenges? Here are some key questions and answers:

Big event overnight was the downgrading of France to Aa1 by Moody’s, bringing it in line with Standard & Poor’s which cut back in January. There are some funds (even in this age of AAA scarcity) which will only invest in top notch debt and take their cue to exit once two agencies have dropped that rating, but the immediate impact is unlikely to be dramatic. The euro has slipped on the news, French government bond futures have dropped about a quarter of a point and safe haven German Bund futures have edged up. “Although it’s not great, the market doesn’t seem too worried,” one trader said.

However, it does throw a spotlight on the gap between France’s economic health (lack of it) and the record low costs it can borrow at. We’ve written plenty of good stuff on this already and French finance minister Moscovici gave his response to us last night. Interestingly, it wasn’t an attack on the ratings agencies, which we’ve seen before from Europe in these circumstances. Instead, he said it was an alarm bell telling the government to pursue structural reforms and reaffirmed his commitment to meet budget deficit targets. He noted that France continued to enjoy record low yields after S&P cut early in the year. The only thing he really took issue with was Moody’s view of the large risks to France’s banks. It warned it could cut France’s rating further.

As the day progresses, thoughts will turn to Greece and this evening’s meeting of euro zone finance ministers. We’ve had a strong exclusive readout of what is likely – an endorsement in principle to unfreeze loans to Greece but a final go-ahead for December disbursement only after a few final reforms are enacted in Athens. Berlin has suggested bundling together the next few Greek bailout tranches in order to pay over 44 billion euros if a green light is given. Others want only the next tranche of 31 billion to be handed over at this stage. Either way, that will keep the show on the road but there is plenty more to be decided yet.

There are still plenty of macro factors to worry about around the world, but China seems to have dropped down the charts. Conversations with delegates at TradeTech Asia, the annual trading heads’ conference held in Singapore, revealed that the U.S. fiscal cliff, food inflation, geopolitical risks in the Middle-East and Europe all trumped China as the major risks out there for financial markets.

Last time this year China was public enemy #1 for investors. But according to the latest Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global fund managers’ survey confidence in the outlook for China’s economy has surged to a three-year high – a big turnaround from a year ago when the fear was that shrinking company profits, rising bad loans and weak global demand at a time of stubbornly high inflation would all add up to a “hard-landing” for the world’s second largest economy. The consensus opinion among economists now is that the worst is over and growth bottomed in the third quarter that ended in September.

Money has come back to the market too. Nine straight weeks of inflows have seen $3.2 billion pumped into China equity funds, according to EPFR, in the lead up to the 18th Party Congress where China’s new leadership was unveiled.  Hong Kong, still the main gateway for foreign investors into China, has seen optimism over China combined with the U.S. Fed’s third round of asset purchases lead to strong capital flows into the market. The territory’s monetary authority was forced to repeatedly intervene to defend the HK$’s peg against the US$ last month while the Chinese yuan is hitting fresh record highs.

It was kind of a big deal coming from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s influential president William Dudley. The former Goldman Sachs partner and chief economist has offered a fig leaf to those who say the problem of banks considered too-big-to-fail must be dealt with more aggressively. Some regional Fed presidents have advocated breaking up these institutions. But Dudley and other powerful figures at the central bank have maintained recent financial reforms have already laid the groundwork for resolving the issue.

At a gathering of financial executives in New York last week, Dudley said he prefers the existing approach of making it costlier for firms to become big in the first place. Still, he left open the possibility of tackling the mega-bank problem more directly:

Should society tolerate a financial system in which certain financial institutions are deemed to be too big to fail? And, if not, then what should we do about it?

Some key positions were staked out on Greece over the weekend – ECB power-behind-the throne Joerg Asmussen became the first euro policymaker to say on the record that euro zone finance ministers meeting on Tuesday would be intent only on finding a deal to tide Greece over the next two years. But IMF chief Christine Lagarde told us in an interview that she would push for a permanent solution to Greece’s debts to avoid prolonged uncertainty and further damage to the Greek economy.
  
Sounds like those two positions could be mutually exclusive. However, it may be that something like a behind-the-scenes pledge from the German government that it will act decisively after next year’s election will keep the IMF on board.

Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker said at the weekend that intensive work was being done on a compromise with the IMF and progress was being made, after the euro zone sherpas put their heads together on Friday. And even hardline German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said a deal had to be struck on Tuesday and would be. Juncker and Lagarde clashed last week over his suggestion that Greece should be given an extra two years, to 2022, to get its debt/GDP ratio down to 120 percent, the level the IMF has decreed is the maximum sustainable. Lagarde looked surprised and firmly rejected the idea.

IMF officials have argued that some writedown for euro zone governments is necessary to make Greece solvent but Germany has repeatedly rejected the idea of taking a loss on holdings of Greek debt, saying it would be illegal. 
Among ideas under consideration to plug the funding gap are further reducing the interest rate and extending the maturity of euro zone loans to Greece, a possible interest payment holiday and bringing forward loan tranches due at the end of the programme, according to euro zone sources.