MacroScope

Some interesting flesh to pick from the bones of the IMF gathering in Tokyo. Most notably, a clutch of high-up euro zone sources in Tokyo told us that Spain could ask for aid next month at the same time as the Greek bailout package and one for Cyprus are sorted out. All roads appear to be pointing to the Nov. 12 meeting of euro zone finance ministers. However, there are other voices saying that Spain could hold off until the new year, given the fall in its borrowing costs since ECB chief Mario Draghi declared he would do whatever it takes to save the euro.

Spain can cover a fairly heavy debt redemption hump at the end of this month but given its recession is deepening, and deficit targets are likely to be missed, the refinancing crunch could fall in January. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy remains a difficult character to read but we know the French are pressing him to jump and Italy’s Mario Monti said on Friday that a Spanish request for bond-buying help would calm the markets.
For his part, Rajoy wants to know what sort of deal he will get. As we reported last week, and El Pais followed up on, he is asking how the ECB would intervene with a preference for it to commit to achieve and maintain a certain yield spread over German Bunds.

Nearly everybody, including, crucially, Angela Merkel, has come round to the view that Greece should stay in the euro zone for now. The possible exception has been German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble but late yesterday, in Singapore, he too seemed to fall into line saying that Greece will not default and that he wanted to shut down any talk of euro zone exit.
Greek PM Antonis Samaras put his foot on the accelerator over the weekend, predicting the broad outlines of a deal on a new austerity package in time for the EU summit at the end of this week, although he appeared to be talking about the troika of EU/IMF/ECB inspectors finishing their work on the ground, rather than a new deal being sealed in full.

That Athens is going to miss its debt-cutting targets is not in doubt given the lack of progress on numerous fronts and an ever-deepening recession. ECB policymaker Joerg Asmussen suggested it could launch voluntary buy-backs of its bonds with money lent by the ESM rescue fund. Because Greek bonds have dropped so far in value, one euro could buy back 1.5 euros of debt. But his ECB colleague, Benoit Coure, ruled out the ECB taking a writedown on the Greek bonds it holds and euro zone governments are equally chary of doing the same. Another euro zone official told us Greece could use proceeds from its privatization drive, which is finally showing signs of life, to retire debt. So plenty of ideas are circulating.

The other element from the IMF that potentially changed the game was its admission that it had miscalculated the effect of fiscal multipliers – that is the effect public spending has on growth through second round effects and the reverse effect that spending cuts have. In other words, it now thinks austerity has delivered a bigger hit to economies than it did previously. That was coupled with Christine Lagarde’s plea for some countries not to frontload debt-cutting. Could this change the debate? As former U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers says in his column for us today: “The IMF’s recognition of the need to sustain demand and avoid lurches to austerity can be very important for the medium term if and only if it is sustained through the next round of economic fluctuations.”

Italy is expected to pay slightly more than it did a month ago to borrow for three years at today’s auction of up to 6 billion euros of a range of bonds. Yields edged up at a sale of 11 billion euros of short-term paper on Wednesday but there is no immediate cause for alarm. Three year-yields have dropped from 5.3 percent to around 3.3 since the ECB declared its readiness to buy the bonds of troubled euro zone sovereigns and Italy has shifted about 80 percent of its debt requirements this year, so is on track in that regard.

The fact that it now seems possible that Mario Monti could continue as prime minister after spring elections can’t do any harm either although yesterday’s surprise cut in income tax muddies the waters a little.

The main problem for Italy is that Spain is in no rush to seek a bailout, a move that would alleviate pressure on Rome too. The IMF kept up the drumbeat of pressure for action in Tokyo, demanding “courageous and cooperative action”, having yesterday said the euro area was still threatened by a “downward spiral of capital flight, breakup fears and economic decline”.  German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble retorted that Europe was solving its problems and had done far more than appeared to outside observers.

The IMF is ratcheting up the pressure on the euro zone again, telling it to deepen financial and fiscal ties as a matter of urgency to restore confidence in the global financial system. Despite the European Central Bank’s recent statement of intent, the Fund said the risks to financial stability had risen over the past six months and it raised its prediction of how much European banks are going to have to offload as part of a deleveraging process that has a long way to run.

An eye-watering $2.8 trillion of assets now needs to be cut over two years, which could further choke off credit to the currency bloc’s weaker members, deepen recessions and push up unemployment. Despite recent steps, the euro area is still threatened by a “downward spiral of capital flight, breakup fears and economic decline”.

Gloomy stuff and particularly noteworthy since the growing view in Europe is that on break-up fears at least, the ECB’s promise to buy sovereign bonds in unlimited amounts, once a country seeks help from the ESM rescue fund, had fundamentally turned a corner.

Euro zone finance ministers, apart from formally launching the ESM rescue fund, made little headway yesterday evening, holding what they called “robust” talks about Greece’s prospects but not coming up with anything to continue the pretence that the country can get back on track. The report from the troika of EU/IMF/ECB inspectors looks likely not to be complete until next month’s Eurogroup meeting.

There are signs of divisions between the euro zone and IMF, with the latter convinced only dramatic measures such as a big writedown on the Greek bonds held by European governments will make the numbers add up. “More needs to be done,” IMF head Christine Lagarde said pointedly last night.

Angela Merkel, who is visiting Athens today and could stir up public Greek anger by doing so, is apparently set on returning to her increasingly critical Bundestag just once more – with a sweeping package to deal with Greece, Spain, Cyprus and maybe Slovenia. Ergo, the lack of Greek progress means any Spanish move for aid is probably some way off. And given the chaotically mixed messages coming from Madrid, it’s not clear that the government there has fully realized it will have to do so at some point.

After a tumultuous fortnight where the European Central Bank, U.S. Federal Reserve, German judges and Dutch voters combined to markedly lift the mood on financial markets, we’re probably in for a more humdrum few days, although a raft of economic data this week will be important – a critical mass of analysts are saying that after strong rallies, it will require evidence of real economic recovery, rather than crisis-fighting solutions, to keep stocks heading up into the year-end.

A weekend meeting of EU finance ministers reflected the progress made, but also the remaining potential pitfalls. Our team there reported the atmosphere was notably more relaxed and Spain’s announcement that it would unveil fresh economic reforms alongside its 2013 budget at the end of the month sent a strong signal that a request for bond-buying help from Madrid is likely in October. If made, the ECB could then pile into the secondary market to buy Spanish debt  if required and hopefully drag Italian borrowing costs down in tandem with Spain’s.

BUT. The Nicosia meeting also exposed unresolved differences between Germany and others over plans to build a banking union. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said handing bank oversight to the European Central Bank is not in itself sufficient to allow the euro zone’s rescue fund to directly assist banks – another key plank of the euro zone’s arsenal. It sounds like that debate went nowhere.
Having largely been the dog that hasn’t barked so far, public unrest is on the rise with big marches in Portugal and Spain over the weekend against further planned tax hikes and spending cuts.

Another blockbuster chapter in the euro zone epic.

Top billing today goes to Germany’s constitutional court, which is expected to give a green light to the euro zone’s permanent rescue fund, the ESM, albeit with some conditions imposed in terms of parliamentary oversight. The ruling begins at 0800 GMT. If the court defied expectations and upheld complaints about the fund, it would lead to the mother of all market sell-offs and plunge the euro zone into its deepest crisis yet.

Without the ESM, the European Central Bank’s carefully constructed plan to backstop the euro zone would be in tatters. It has said it will only intervene to buy the bonds of the bloc’s strugglers if they first seek help from the rescue fund and sign up to the strings that will be attached. The first rescue fund, the EFSF, could perhaps fill this role for a while but its resources are now threadbare, so without the ESM, markets would scent blood.

The Dutch go to the polls but with the hard-left Socialists seemingly losing support, the ruling Liberal party and moderate centre-left Labour are  neck-and-neck and look likely to form a coalition government committed to tight debt control and, more importantly, to the euro zone. So unless voters are lying to pollsters, some of the drama has leached out of this particular saga although it could take some considerable time to put a coalition together.

After some perplexingly negative initial market reaction to the Draghi gambit everything turned around. European stocks leapt nearly 2.5 percent yesterday and Asian shares are set to bank their biggest daily gain in six weeks. Italian and Spanish borrowing costs have fallen markedly.

The fact that the ECB has set no limit on how many bonds it might buy marks this scheme out as very different to its predecessor but we’ve seen many false dawns before so it behoves us to keep an eye on what might prevent ECB President Mario Draghi drawing a line under nearly three years of debt crisis.

       1. Could Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann, who remains strongly opposed, quit as his predecessor did last year? Very unlikely for now though there could be a later confrontation, on which more below. It was notable how many of Angela Merkel’s political lieutenants were deployed in public to back Draghi yesterday, although the German press have taken an altogether more negative view which could inflame German public opinion.

Spain will auction up to three billion euros of a mixture of debt having enjoyed sharply lower borrowing costs at a T-bill auction earlier in the week. However, with 10-year yields still perilously close to 7 percent, it’s pretty clear that the latest austerity drive by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy – which will take 65 billion euros out of the economy by the end of 2014 – seems to have achieved little more than settling the bond market slightly.

All the efforts of the past few weeks – the bank bailout, the fresh austerity measures and the leeway on deficit targets from the euro zone – appear aimed at keeping a full Spanish sovereign bailout at bay. But it’s quite possible that all these efforts are actually hastening a full bailout rather than warding it off by driving Spain deeper into recession and cutting state revenues.  That is something the euro zone rescue funds with a maximum of 500 billion euros at their disposal, 100 billion of which is earmarked for Spain’s banks, cannot really afford.
We’ll get the final, firm details of the Spanish bank rescue on Friday.

Secondary markets prices suggest the yields on the two-, five- and seven-year bonds will all rise from the last time these maturities were sold and Spain’s advantage of having front-loaded debt issuance in the first half of the year has evaporated as looser deficit targets agreed with Brussels and Madrid’s commitment to help its debt-laden regions have added more than 20 billion euros to the amount it thought it would have to raise in 2012.

Greece announced late yesterday that it would need a bridging loan to tide it over until it finds the nearly 12 billion euros of spending cuts demanded by the EU/IMF/ECB troika of inspectors, after which the next tranche of bailout money can flow, probably in September. The troika is due to return next week. There’s no doubt Athens will get the interim money. Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs the group of euro zone finance ministers, said last week that nobody should fret about Greece’s finances in August. They would be shored up.

Today, Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras is expected to put a draft list of cuts to the leaders of the three parties comprising the country’s ruling coalition, who are rather hemmed in by pledges to voters not to fire civil servants and shun sweeping pensions and public sector wage cuts.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti threw in a curve ball last night, saying there was a real prospect that the autonomous island of Sicily could default. It accounts for about 5.5 percent of Italian GDP so shouldn’t wreck the country’s finances but it’s not a step in the right direction. If Italy’s debt mountain of 120 percent of GDP started rising rather than falling, it could be taken very badly by the markets.

After the EU summit exceeded expectations the more considered verdict of the markets will dictate in the short-term, certainly until the European Central Bank’s policy meeting on Thursday. Previous summit deals crumbled pretty quickly buying only a few days or even hours of market relief.

After strong gains on Friday, Asian stocks are up modestly and European shares have edged higher. However, German Bund futures are nearly half a point higher, so something’s got to give and more often than not it’s the stock market that thinks again. So maybe Friday’s rally was a one-off.

For it to have any legs, the ECB may well have to come up with something on Thursday, and a quarter-point rate cut – widely priced in – may not be enough. ECB policymaker Asmussen is already out saying Greece must should not loosen its bailout programme, Spain can restore confidence with a bank recap plan that builds in a large margin for error and dismissing calls for the ESM rescue fund, which comes into being next week, to get a banking licence so it could draw on virtually unlimited ECB funds. That all sounds fairly uncompromising.