MacroScope

Where is the Japanese money? Mostly it has been heading back to home shores as we wrote here yesterday.

The assumption was that the Bank of Japan's huge money-printing campaign would push Japanese retail and institutional investors out in search of yield.  Emerging markets were expected to capture at least part of a potentially huge outflow from Japan and also benefit from rising allocations from other international funds as a result.  But almost a month after the BOJ announced its plans, the cash has not yet arrived.

EM investors, who seem to have been banking the most on the arrival of Japanese cash, may be forgiven for feeling a tad nervous. Data from EPFR Global shows no notable pick-up in flows to EM bond funds while cash continues to flee EM equities ($2 billion left last week).

But first, some good news. Retail investors are demonstrating some interest in emerging assets. Barclays says launches of toshin or investment trusts last week garnered $2 billion in subscriptions, with a Pacific Rim equities fund, partly geared to Asia, receiving $1.2 billion.  The previous week saw a $500 million ASEAN fund while an emerging equities toshin started in March took in $1.6 billion. There has also been net new uridashi bond issuance in the Mexican, Brazilian, Turkish and Russian currencies over the past few weeks, Barclays data shows.

The bad news is that Japanese  funds and insurers -- and that's where the big money is -- have steered clear of emerging markets, and indeed foreign assets so far.   Barclays writes that could be bad news for markets such as Hungary and South Africa, which have poor fundamentals and have benefited from talk of Japanese cash:

They’ve only been looking for it for a day but Cyprus’s Plan B has already taken on mythical status. A myth it might remain.

Ideas being floated include nationalizing the pension fund (back of the envelope calculations suggest that will raise less than a billion euros) and issuing bonds underpinned by future natural gas revenues (but no one is really sure how much they are worth). So to avoid default it still looks like the Cypriots may have to return to the bank levy they rejected so decisively in parliament on Tuesday, to raise the 5.8 billion euros the euro zone is demanding in return for a bailout.

Finance minister Sarris is still in Moscow hoping for some change out of the Russians and is out this morning saying discussions are ongoing about banks and natural gas.

Three big events today which will tell us a lot about the euro zone and its struggle to pull out of economic malaise despite the European Central Bank having removed break-up risk from the table.

1. The European Commission will issue fresh economic forecasts which will presumably illuminate the lack of any sign of recovery outside Germany. Just as starkly, they will show how far off-track the likes of Spain, France and Portugal are from meeting their deficit targets this year. All three have, explicitly or implicitly, admitted as much and expect Brussels to give them more leeway. That looks inevitable (though not until April) but it would be interesting to hear the German view. We’ve already had Slovakia, Austria and Finland crying foul about France getting cut some slack. El Pais claims to have seen the Commission figures and says Spain’s deficit will will come in at 6.7 percent of GDP this year, way above a goal of 4.5 percent. The deficit will stay high at 7.2 percent in 2014, the point so far at which Madrid is supposed to reach the EU ceiling of three percent.

2. Banks get their first chance to repay early some of the second chunk of more than a trillion euros of ultra-cheap three-year money the ECB doled out last year. First time around about 140 billion was repaid, more than expected, indicating that at least parts of the euro zone banking system was returning to health. Another hefty 130 billion euros is forecast for Friday. That throws up some interesting implications. First there is a two-tier banking system in the currency bloc again with banks in the periphery still shut out. Secondly, it means the ECB’s balance sheet is tightening while those of the Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan continue to balloon thanks to furious money printing. The ECB insists there is plenty of excess liquidity left to stop money market rates rising much and a big rise in corporate euro-denominated bond sales helps too. But all else being equal, that should propel the euro yet higher, the last thing a struggling euro zone economy needs.

For those who thought the euro zone had lost the power to liven things up, today should make you think again.

ITEM 1. The European Central Bank meeting and Mario Draghi’s hour-long press conference to follow. Rarely has a meeting which will deliver no monetary policy change been so pregnant with possibilities.

Draghi, the man tasked with becoming the European bank regulator on top of all his other tasks, will face some searing questioning on his time as Bank of Italy chief and what he knew about the disaster that has befallen the country’s oldest bank, Monte dei Paschi.

Italy comes to the market with a five- and 10-year bond auction today and, continuing the early year theme, yields are expected to fall with demand healthy. It could raise up to 6.5 billion euros. A sale of six-month paper on Tuesday was snapped up at a yield of just 0.73 percent. Not only is the bond market unfazed by next month’s Italian elections, which could yet produce a chaotic aftermath, neither is it bothered by the scandal enveloping the world’s oldest bank, Monte dei Paschi, which is deepening by the day.

Even before this week (it also sold nearly 7 billion euros of debt on Monday), Italy had already shifted 10 percent of its annual funding needs. Clearly it, and Spain, is off to a flying start which removes a lot of potential market pressure.

But the disconnect with the miserable state of the two countries’ economies should still give pause for thought. Flash Q4 Spanish GDP figures, out later, are forecast to show its economy contracted by a further 0.6 percent in the last three months of the year, with absolutely no end to recession in sight. That looks like a good opportunity to detail the state of the Spanish economy and how it could yet push Madrid towards seeking outside help. Italian business confidence data are also due.

We’ve been saying for some time that while the immediate heat may be off the euro zone, therein lies a danger – that policymakers will relax their efforts to remould the bloc into a tougher structure that can withstand future crises, and possibly even allow this crisis to flare back into life.

Exhibit A has been the apparent backsliding on what we thought was a concrete plan to allow the euro zone rescue funds to recapitalize banks directly from next year, thereby removing the onus on highly indebted governments to do so. Over the weekend we got Exhibit B courtesy of a Reuters exclusive.

We reported that the European Central Bank had rejected Ireland’s solution to avoid the crippling cost of servicing money borrowed to rescue its failed banking system – debt servicing would amount to around 3 billion euros a year for the next 10 years. Dublin wanted to convert the promissory note into long-term bonds. The ECB decided last week that that crossed its red line of monetary financing.

No one really questions Angela Merkel’s supremacy in Germany but losing the key state of Lower Saxony in a Sunday election, albeit by the narrowest of margins, means we’ll have to put on ice proclamations that her re-election for a third term in the autumn is now merely a procession. The centre-left SPD and Greens won the state by a single seat. Merkel and others will speak about the result today. What it probably does affirm is that the Chancellor will be extremely cautious about agreeing to more euro zone crisis fighting measures before the national election is safely out of the way.

We’ve been here before. When the drumbeat of market pressure eases, euro zone policymakers have tended to lose their sense of urgency. Today’s meeting of euro zone finance ministers, the first of the year, could be a case in point. The agenda lists “progress” on Cyprus, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece with no decisions expected.
The meeting is set to anoint Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem as its new chairman after France dropped its objections on Sunday. He will attend the final press conference so it will be interesting to hear his pitch.

The most important area of debate will be the euro zone’s rescue fund and its ability eventually to recapitalize struggling banks directly, thereby breaking the “doom loop” whereby weak governments drive themselves further into debt by propping up listing banks while the lenders are stuffed with that government’s bonds which are liable to lose value. EU leaders seemed pretty clear at last June’s summit that this would be done but there are now suggestions that governments will remain on the hook to at least some extent. That would be a very significant backward step.

Big news over the weekend was the world’s banks being given an extra four years to build up their cash piles, and given more flexibility about what assets they can throw into the pot. This is a serious loosening of the previously planned regime and could have a significant effect on banks’ willingness to lend and therefore the wider economy.

For over two years, banks have complained that they can’t oil the wheels of business investment and consumer spending while being forced to build up much larger capital reserves to ward off future financial crises. That contradiction has now been broken (a big win for the bank lobbyists) and the impact on economic recovery could be profound.

However, there are no guarantees. Banks, in Europe at least, have also insisted that lending has remained low because there isn’t the demand for credit from business and households. If that’s true, increased willingness to lend might not be snapped up.

Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Tarullo’s call for limiting bank size is sparking debate in unexpected places. Keith Hennessey, who ran the National Economic Council under President Bush, was in Chicago late last week for a discussion with Democratic lawmaker Barney Frank. The topic of the panel, sponsored by CME Group Inc., was the housing crisis.

But the most spirited exchange took place after Hennessey said that banks are simply too big to regulate adequately. “I think Tarullo has got a good point,” he said, referring to Tarullo’s argument for the need to cap bank size. Hennessey, as Bush’s economic policy assistant in 2008, was among administration officials that worked to win Congressional approval for the bailout of insurance major AIG, as its failure threatened to plunge the nation’s financial markets, already reeling from the failure of Lehman Brothers, even deeper into crisis.

Lawmakers eventually relented. On Friday, Frank, who co-authored Wall Street reform legislation designed to prevent another bailout of a too-big-to-fail financial institutions, was not about to cede ground this time to Hennessey. “I didn’t ask what Tarullo thinks – are you for breaking up the banks, and if so, to what size, and by what method?”  “Right now I don’t see any better solution than what Tarullo has suggested – yes, a size cap on banks… The alternative is a repeat of the 2008 crisis.” After the panel, Frank said he took issue with the idea, both from a technical perspective – “How do you do it? Do you sell it? Who’s going to buy it? The other banks by definition can’t.” – and because of concern that trimming bank size will hurt the ability of U.S. financial institutions to compete internationally.

Mounting speculation that Spain is prepping for a bailout begs the question – what happens to Italy?

Sources told Reuters Spain is considering freezing pensions and speeding up a planned rise in the retirement age as it races to cut spending and meet conditions of an expected international sovereign aid package.

Markets took this to mean it was preparing the ground for eventually asking for help. According to Lyn Graham-Taylor, fixed income strategist at Rabobank: