MacroScope

Ireland, hailed as the poster child of euro zone austerity, is hoping to get back into the long-term bond market this year. But analysts say a hasty return could do more harm than good.

Its market position has certainly improved since it was pushed out of commercial markets and forced to seek a bailout, even though the population at large is still struggling with rigorous austerity.

Ten-year Irish yields have halved to just below 7 percent since July – before the European Central Bank began buying Spanish and Italian bonds in the secondary market to stabilise peripheral markets.

Irish CDS has also outperformed other euro zone strugglers, sliding 119 basis points to 605 bps over the same period while Spain’s climbed 168 basis points and Italy’s jumped 196 basis points, according to Markit data.

And Irish 10-year bonds have made total returns of 12.1 percent so far this year, second only to Italy in the euro zone, Thomson Reuters data shows.

There’s a sense of relief among European policymakers that the worst of the euro zone’s crisis appears to have passed. Olli Rehn, the EU’s top economic officials, talked this week of a “turning of the tide in the coming months”. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, speaks of “sizeable progress” and “a reassuring picture”.

At last week’s spring summit, EU leaders couldn’t say it enough: “This meeting is not a crisis meeting … it’s not crisis management,” according to Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen. All the talk is of how the euro zone’s economy will recover in the second half of this year.

But for the 330 million Europeans who make up the euro zone, the outlook has, if anything, darkened. As euro zone governments deepen their commitment to deficit-cutting, and rising oil prices mean higher-than-expected inflation, households can’t be counted on to drive growth. Not only did housing spending fall 0.4 percent in the October to December period from the third quarter, but unemployment rose to its highest since late 1997 in January.

In the more than two years that have passed since the start of Europe’s financial crisis, France has consistently aligned itself with Germany in pushing for greater austerity in so-called “peripheral countries” like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel even took the rare and somewhat awkward step of publicly campaigning for French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

But a closer look at the country’s debt profile suggests France may be misjudging its own underlying financial conditions. Even beyond French banks’ considerable exposure to southern European sovereign bonds, analysts say the economic backdrop is remarkably similar to nations that have run into trouble.

Writes Christoph Weil of Commerzbank in a research note:

France has the same problems as the euro periphery. The French economy is struggling with a massive loss of competitiveness and rising unemployment, while the consolidation of government finances is progressing at a sluggish pace.  [...]

Jason Lange contributed to this post.

Suddenly the shoe is on the other foot. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 had its roots in the U.S. banking system and then spread to Europe. Now, it’s Europe’s political debacle that threatens economic growth in the United States.

A recent raft of better U.S. economic data, including a steep drop in weekly jobless claims reported on Thursday, have pointed to a swifter recovery. But such signals seem a bit futile when there’s a risk of another major global financial meltdown lurking.

Yet just what is the likely impact of the euro zone’s morass on the United States? Economists at Goldman Sachs ran some figures through their models, and the results were not pretty: overall, Europe’s crisis is likely to shave a full percentage point off U.S. economic growth.  In a world where economists have come to expect the “new normal” for U.S. growth to be around 2.5 percent, that could mean the difference between a decent recovery and one that is highly fragile and vulnerable to shocks.

With Southern Europe getting so much of the blame for the continent’s financial crisis, it is refreshing to see someone highlight the other side of the coin. That’s just what Joshua Rosner, managing director of Graham Fisher & Co., did in testimony on Thursday. Asked to discuss the potential risk to U.S. taxpayers of the ongoing political battle over a frayed monetary union, Fisher began his remarks by debunking the reigning narratives being used to describe the crisis:

To fully assess the risks to the United States and our proper role in the euro zone  crisis it must first be clear what the crisis is and is not. It is not a bailout of the populations of the weaker European economies such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Hungary or Belgium. After all, the populations of those countries are being forced to give up portions of their sovereignty in the name of austerity toward a fiscal union.

Rather, I would contend, it is a bailout of banks in the core countries of Europe, of their stockholders and creditors who, failing to gain sufficient access capital markets, would need to be recapitalized by their host country governments. It is a transfer of losses from banks and corporations onto the backs of ordinary people without requiring any recognition of losses by those banks whose risk management and lending practices created the problem. It is as much a tale of over lending as it is of over borrowing and, just as nobody should feel undue sympathy for those who miscalculated the amount of debt they could service, nobody should feel for those who miscalculated their lending risks.

Any lingering illusion that the European crisis could be contained to so-called peripheral countries with high debt levels was shattered on Wednesday. German government bonds, which had thus far been seen as a safe-haven, slumped sharply after investors shunned the country’s auction of new 10-year debt.

Germany drew significantly less bids than the amount on offer for its Bunds, with investors deterred by very low yields. There is a growing view the euro zone powerhouse will pay a high price whatever the outcome of the regional debt crisis. If the crisis spirals out of control, some fear that it could reach a magnitude that would hit Germany as well by sending it into a deep recession. On the other hand, any solution to the crisis is likely to involve a higher fiscal bill for Germany.

Marc Ostwald at Monument Securities in London describe the auction as “a complete and utter disaster.” He continued:

If it were about age, 40-somethings would cringe. But it seems a dead certainty that 40 now means 50 -- or even higher -- when it comes to predicting the chances of a recession taking place.

Going by past Reuters polls of economists, every time the probability hits 40 percent, the recession's already started or is perilously close to doing so.

After the brief recovery period from the Great Recession, Reuters once again started surveying economists several months ago on the chances of developed economies stumbling back into the muck.

The reigning narrative of Europe’s financial turmoil is that profligate European states, agglomerated all too offensively by a swine-referenced acronym, are forcing the continent’s wealthy, prudent northern countries to come to their rescue. Not so, according to two policy experts who spoke this week at a conference on the euro zone crisis at the University of Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

They argue that labor reforms in Germany prevented the wages of manufacturing workers from rising after monetary union had been completed, making the country more competitive at the expense of its southern peers. Joerg Bibow, a professor of economics at Skidmore College, gives his view of events:

Germany’s wage trends have been the most important cause of the euro zone crisis. Those wage trends created an asymmetric shock that destabilized Europe.

After a hopeful couple of weeks and the ”euphoria” caused by an agreement to tackle the euro zone debt crisis, financial markets got a reality check from Italy’s sale of 7.94 billion euros of government bonds. The debt met lower demand than at previous auctions, forcing the country to pay the highest premium since joining the single currency to sell 10-year debt.

The results suggest markets did not think the euro zone rescue deal — which includes an agreement on the write-down of Greek debt, recapitalisation of European banks and leveraging of the euro zone rescue fund – went far enough to restore investor appetite for Italian debt.

Italian yields rose as high as 6.03 percent near levels not seen since early August, when the European Central Bank first began purchasing Italian and Spanish bonds in the secondary market to bring funding costs down to more affordable levels. Brian Barry, analyst at Evolution Securities, says that move alone speaks volumes:

So much for Germany being insulated from the euro zone’s troubled periphery. German credit default swaps are already beginning to price in the country’s worst nightmare: that it will have to pay a hefty bill for a deepening euro zone debt crisis.

The cost of insuring 5-year German debt against default rose more than 50 percent over the past month to a record high of 118 basis points.  French CDS rose  around 11 percent over the same period to 189 basis points, according to Markit data. The rise indicates investors are beginning to associate greater risk to holding German debt, even as the triple-A rated bond continues to benefit from safe-haven flows. German Bund futures saw their biggest quarterly rise between July and September since the launch of the euro.

The problem is Germany, the largest sovereign contributor to bailout funds already agreed for Greece, Portugal and Ireland, is expected to pay a high price for any solution to the debt crisis or, given its banks’ high exposure to peripheral debt, for any failure to resolve it.