MacroScope

It’s May Day and most of Europe, barring Britain, is taking a holiday so maybe it’s a day to take stock.

But first, a nervous glance at little Slovenia. Last night Moody’s cut its debt rating to junk, forcing Ljubljana to abandon a planned bond issue which looked set to raise several billion dollars and making a fifth euro zone sovereign bailout much more likely. Given the ham-fisted effort to rescue Cyprus didn’t put markets into a spin, it’s unlikely Slovenia will upset the euro zone applecart but it’s a reminder that this crisis isn’t over and won’t be until the currency bloc gets serious about creating a banking union. Slovenia’s problems, like Cyprus’s, are rooted in the banking sector, which is stifled by about 7 billion euros in bad loans.

One bullet was dodged when the Cypriot parliament narrowly approved its bailout late yesterday, which will avert bankruptcy but at a painful cost.

Looking at the wider picture, Item One on the agenda is that after euro zone inflation plunged to 1.2 percent yesterday – way below the European Central Bank’s target of close to but below two percent – it now has the greenest of green lights to act at Thursday’s policy meeting.

We already had it on very good authority that a quarter-point interest rate cut is on the cards, which will take rates to a record low 0.5 percent. However, nobody is under any illusion that that alone is going to lift the currency bloc out of recession, one reason perhaps that a debate is now raging over the benefits of cutting debt versus going for growth at a governmental level.

Fresh from winning a vote of confidence in parliament, new Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta heads to Berlin to meet Angela Merkel, pledging to shift the euro zone’s focus on austerity in favour of a drive to create jobs. He may be pushing at a partially open door. Even the German economy is struggling at the moment and the top brass in Brussels have declared either that debt-cutting has reached its limits and/or that now is the time to exercise flexibility. Letta will move on from Berlin to Brussels and Paris later in the week.

France, Spain and others will next month be given more time to meet their deficit targets and Berlin does not seem to object. Don’t expect Merkel to join the anti-austerity chorus but there are some hints of a shift even in Europe’s paymaster. Yesterday, it launched a bilateral plan with Spain to boost lending to smaller companies and said it could be rolled out elsewhere too. Details were very sketchy but something may be afoot. The European Central Bank, expected to cut interest rates on Thursday, is considering something similar although that is far from a done deal.

Forgotten about Cyprus, which only last month had financial markets in a lather and threatened to reignite the euro zone debt crisis? Today, Cypriot politicians vote on the terms of the bailout offered by the euro zone. It should pass but it could be tight. No single party has a majority in the 56-member parliament, and the government is counting on support from members of its three party centre-right coalition which have 30 seats in total.

“Reality is sticky.” That was the core of Adam Posen’s message to German policymakers on their home turf, at a recent conference in Berlin.

What did the former UK Monetary Policy Committee member mean? Quite simply, that the types of structural economic changes that Germany has been pushing on the euro zone are not only destructive but also bound to fail, at least if history is any guide.

Posen, who now heads the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, argued Germany’s imposition of austerity on Europe’s battered periphery is the product of an instinctive but misguided fear of an inflation “ghost” that has haunted the country since the hyperinflationary spurt of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. However, Posen offers a convincing account of modern economic history that shows inflation episodes are rather rare events associated with major political and institutional meltdown — and not always around the corner.

The European Central Bank takes centre stage. While others in the euro zone are saying the way Cyprus was bailed out – with bank bondholders and big depositors hit – could be repeated, the ECB insists it was a one-off.

Fearful of any signs of contagion it will continue to talk that talk and there’s no sign of it having to do more so far, with no bank run even in Cyprus let alone further afield. But the last two weeks has reignited debate about what the ECB might have to do in extremis. It’s no nearer deploying its bond-buying programme but it could flood the currency area’s financial system with long-term liquidity again if called upon.

Interest rates are expected to be held at a record low 0.75 percent. Hints of policy easing further out are not out of the question. As ever, Mario Draghi’s hour long press conference will be minutely parsed but there will be nothing to match the Bank of Japan which earlier announced a stunning revamp of its policymaking rules – setting a balance sheet target which will involve printing money faster and pledging to double its government bond holdings over two years.

Money markets largely braved Cyprus’s bailout saga last week, but figures showing liquidity conditions are tightening suggest sentiment may not be as resilient the next time around.

Data from CrossBorder Capital, an independent financial firm that specialises in analysing global liquidity flows, shows the euro zone saw its biggest capital outflow in March since late 2011 – around the time the ECB injected liquidity into the financial system.

Financial institutions and governments took a net $175 billion worth of bonds and stocks, on an annualised basis, out of the euro zone in March – the biggest outflow since $201.4 billion in December 2011, according to the data.

The problem of a “democratic deficit” that might arise from the process of European integration has always been high on policymakers’ minds. The term even has its own Wikipedia entry.

As Cypriots waited patiently in line for banks to reopen after being shuttered for two weeks, the issue was brought to light with particular clarity, since the country’s bailout is widely seen as being imposed on it by richer, more powerful states, particularly Germany.

Luxembourg has accused the Germans of trying to impose “hegemony” on the euro zone.  The country, whose banking system, like Cyprus’, is very large relative to the economy’s tiny size, fears that similarly harsh treatment could be imposed on its depositors.

Cypriot banks were supposed to reopen today but they won’t and when they do capital controls will be slapped on to prevent money fleeing its borders (was that how the single currency zone and single market was supposed to work?) The controls are supposed to be temporary but the Icelandic experience showed that once imposed they can be devilishly hard to remove. It seems pretty certain that there will be a bank run when the doors are reopened, which is now slated for Thursday.

Dutch Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem gave markets a jolt yesterday. In an interview with Reuters he said in future, the onus would be put on banks to recapitalize and if they couldn’t “then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders”. He added that he wanted to get to a situation where the euro zone never needed to use its ESM rescue fund to recapitalize banks directly – a plan that was created last year at the height of the crisis. That all seemed crystal clear but after some adverse market reaction a later statement was put out on his behalf reverting to the earlier line that Cyprus was a one-off case.

So which is it? One-off or precedent? With a banking system eight times the size of its economy and awash with foreign money Cyprus clearly is unlike any of its euro zone peers. But it’s been also clear for some time now that Germany and other northern Europeans don’t want taxpayers to be on the hook for future bailouts and are not keen on using the ESM to recapitalize banks (that was supposed to break the doom loop between weak banks and sovereigns but maybe not any more). German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was explicit after the bailout was agreed in the early hours of Monday morning, saying with the bail-in “we got what we always wanted”. As such, the Bundestag is almost certain to vote for it.

The Cypriot saga has thrown the spotlight on Slovenia, which is also a small euro zone country struggling with an over-burdened banking sector.

Slovenia’s mostly state-owned banks are nursing some 7 billion euros of bad loans, equal to about 20 percent of GDP, underpinning persistent speculation that the country might have to follow other vulnerable euro zone countries in seeking a bailout.

According to Standard Bank’s head of emerging market research Tim Ash:

The latest crisis in the euro zone, this time in Cyprus, continues to raise questions as to possible contagion effects throughout the region, and in particular which economies could be next.

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.

The slow motion Cypriot car crash of the past five days reached impact point last night when not a single lawmaker voted for the bailout with bank levy attached – the first time a euro zone legislature has simply said no.

So what next? The finance minister is in Russia, ostensibly to seek an extension on an existing 2.5 billion euros loan on better terms, but could there be more on offer besides? The Eurogroup made clear last night that the 10 billion euros bailout was still on the table but that Nicosia had to come up with 5.8 billion euros of its own – the sum that a levy on bank depositors was supposed to raise. Could Moscow fill that gap, maybe in return for a slice of the island’s untapped offshore gas reserves? It looks unlikely but not impossible and there are powerful geopolitics at play. That there will be no more money from the euro zone looks like a given and there seems to be a resolve that it would be better to let Cyprus default then buckle at the last moment.

Finance minister Sarris has just said he hopes for a deal on the existing Russian loan today. In Nicosia, the president is meeting party leaders.