Manifest currency? U.S. dollar’s global dominance not set in stone
Incumbency, it is often said, confers many advantages.
Sitting U.S. presidents certainly have reaped its benefits – in the past 80 years, only three have been unseated.
Most economists believe the same benefits apply to reserve currencies. Yes, the U.S. dollar may one day be supplanted as the leading international currency, the thinking goes, but that day is many decades away.
Then again, maybe not.
A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks more closely at the dollar’s own rise to the top in the 20th century suggests, among other things, that “the advantages of incumbency are not all they are cracked up to be.”
By looking at the currency denomination of foreign public debt issued by 33 countries from 1914 to 1946, the authors – University of California-Berkeley professor Barry Eichengreen and Livia Chitu and Arnaud Mehl of the European Central Bank – find that dollar-denominated bonds were nearly equal to those priced in sterling by the late 1920s. That’s about two decades earlier than the date assumed by previous scholars.
When stripping out Commonwealth countries that had strong commercial and political links with Britain, the dollar overtook sterling in 1929.
Greek political poll tracker
Greece faces another election on June 17. Although they reject the austerity required by the bailout, most Greeks want their country to stay in the euro. However Frankfurt and Brussels say it is impossible for Greece to have one without the other: no bailout means no euro and a return to the drachma. Whether the Greek people believe these warnings could have a big impact on the election result.
First place comes with an automatic bonus of 50 seats, meaning even the slightest edge could be pivotal in determining the makeup of the next government.
Click here for an interactive chart showing the latest polls:
The party is clicked by default in the interactive version. The absence from the “photo” on the blog was an oversight, which has now been corrected. Thank you for pointing this out.
Europe’s triple threat: bad banks, big debts, slow growth
The financial turmoil still dogging Europe is most often described as a debt crisis. But sovereign debt is only part of the problem, according to new research from Jay Shambaugh, economist at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. The other two prongs of what he describes as three coexisting crises are the region’s troubled banks and the prospect of an imminent recession.
These problems are mutually reinforcing, and require a more forceful policy response than the authorities have delivered to date. In particular, Shambaugh advocates using tax policy to lower labor costs, fiscal stimulus from those economies strong enough to afford it, and more aggressive action from the European Central Bank:
It is possible that coordinated shifts in payroll and consumption taxes could aid the painful process of internal devaluation. The EFSF could be used to capitalize banks and to help break the sovereign / bank link. Fiscal support in core countries could help spur growth. Finally, the ECB could provide liquidity to sovereigns and increase nominal GDP growth as well as allow slightly faster inflation to facilitate deleveraging and relative price adjustments across regions.
All these steps, especially if taken together in an attempt to treat the three crises holistically could substantially improve outcomes. At the same time, institutional reforms to create a true financial union and a common risk free asset could help both solve the current problems and reduce the connections of these crises in the future. Of course, politics, ideology, or additional economic shocks could all hinder improvement. The euro area is highly vulnerable and without deft policy may continue in crisis for a considerable amount of time.
A recovery in Europe? Really?
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.
Joblessness is reaching shameful levels in southern Europe. In Greece, unemployment rose to a new record high of 21 percent in December and to 23 percent in Spain in January. Even in wealthy, northern Europe, the number of people out of work has started to rise in France, the Netherlands and Germany.
Just over half of the euro zone‘s economic output is generated by domestic consumer spending, but demand for goods looks chronically weak and fiscal austerity is aggravating the situation. Euro zone governments, desperate to distinguish themselves from debt-stricken Greece, are completely unwilling to step in and spend. The European Commission, persuaded mainly by Germany that fiscal discipline will lift economic growth, is on their backs to get their deficits within the 3 percent level of GDP by the end of 2013.
“The case against Europe’s growth strategy is that it is all supply and no demand,” said Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. “Fiscal policy is being tightened too rapidly. The more certain EU countries do to balance their budgets, the more output contracts,” he said in a recent paper.
So where will growth come from? The ECB’s Draghi said this week he is counting on foreign demand. Emerging Asia and a stronger recovery in the United States might help pull the euro zone out of its slump. But with Germany responsible for almost 40 percent of the euro zone’s exports, a wider tide of prosperity across the currency area looks unlikely.
Europe’s wobbly economy
Things are looking a bit unsteady in the euro zone’s economy. Just ask Olli Rehn, the EU’s top economic official, who warned this week of “risky imbalances” in 12 of the European Union’s 27 members. And that’s doesn’t include Greece, which is too wobbly for words.
Rehn is looking longer term, trying to prevent the next crisis. But the here-and-now is just as wobbly. The euro zone’s economy, which generates 16 percent of world output, shrunk at the end of 2011 and most economists expect the 17-nation currency area to wallow in recession this year and contract around 0.4 percent overall. Few would have been able to see it coming at the start of last year, when Europe’s factories were driving a recovery from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. And it shows just how poisonous the sovereign debt saga has become.
Not everyone thinks things are so shaky. Unicredit’s chief euro zone economist, Marco Valli, is among the few who believe the euro zone will skirt a recession — defined by two consecutive quarters of contraction — in 2012. This year is “bound to witness a gradual but steady improvement in underlying growth momentum,” Valli said, saying the fourth quarter was the low point in the euro zone business cycle.
That could still happen. Business surveys support the idea that the worst is behind us, while European Central Bank President Mario Draghi agrees that last year’s collapse in confidence has now steadied, albeit at low levels. So far, the ECB has not given a strong signal on whether it will take interest rates below the 1 percent level for the first time, but the bigger risk is whether a disorderly Greek default or the threat of a severe credit freeze — which the ECB’s nearly 500 billion euros in loans has so far helped avoid – come back to crush the green shoots of growth.
The ECB’s latest lending survey showed for the last three months of 2011 reinforces the concerns of a credit crunch, as banks are still not passing the money on to the real economy. Thirty-five percent of banks reported they had tightened the standards they apply to loans to businesses, compared to only 16 percent in the third quarter. The ECB is set to make its second offer of three-year loans at the end of the month and that could ease credit risks, but may also discourage banks with bad loans on their books to reform.
So, in economist-speak, the risks are still on the downside and uncertainty remains high. Basically, things are still looking wobbly.
When the euro shorts take off
Currency speculators boosted bets against the euro to a record high in the latest week of data (to end December 27) and built up the biggest long dollar position since mid-2010, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Here — courtesy of Reuters’ graphics whiz Scott Barber, is what happens to the euro when shorts build up:
The question is how many more weeks to go before a serious correction in equities?
What the euro crisis is not
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.
Contemplating Italian debt restructuring
This week’s evaporation of confidence in the euro zone’s biggest government debt market — Italy’s 1.6 trillion euros of bonds and bills and the world’s third biggest — has opened a Pandora’s Box that may now force investors to consider the possibility of a mega sovereign debt default or writedown and, or maybe as a result of, a euro zone collapse.
Given the dynamics and politics of the euro zone, this is a chicken-or-egg situation where it’s not clear which would necessarily come first. Greece has already shown it’s possible for a “voluntary” creditor writedown of the country’s debts to the tune of 50 percent without — immediately at least — a euro exit. On the other hand, leaving the euro and absorbing a maxi devaluation of a newly-minted domestic currency would instantly render most country’s euro-denominated debts unpayable in full.
But if a mega government default is now a realistic risk, the numbers on the “ifs” and “buts” are being crunched.
Mark Schofield and Jamie Searle, strategists at U.S. investment bank Citi, on Thursday attempted to figure out “fair value” for Italian government borrowing rates in the light of the week’s dramatic events that saw 10-year yields on the bonds briefly top the “make-or-break level of 7% . Their conclusion was that Italian debt crunch was likely to get get a lot worse before it got better, absent a “significant and sizeable” political intervention. By this, they are referring to the only scenario that they see would trigger a near-term turnaround — open-ended ECB buying on a scale far greater than currently being seen. However, they reckoned they still seems unlikely, for now.
What’s left of the 440 bilion euro bailout fund is not big enough to rescue Italy — where more than 300 billion euros needs to be found next year alone to pay interest costs and replace maturing debt. And with the recently-agreed, leveraged-up version of that EFSF unlikely to be finalised until next monthat the earliest, the Italian market is left in limbo.
As a result, the Citi analysts say it’s become impossible to assess fair value for the market based on macro fundamentals such as debt stock, budget deficits, national growth, inflation and central bank interest rates. So, they reckon they have to apply a “recovery-based default model” that takes in hypothetical debt restructurings and default probabilities. Given the recent Greek example, the 50% debt haircut has inevitably become a reference point.
Given that scenario, they reckoned 10-year Italian borrowing rates would have to rise as high as 14.5% — more than twice current rates — to compensate for the risks.
from Jeremy Gaunt:
Why is the euro still strong?
One of the more bizarre aspects of the euro zone crisis is that the currency in question -- the euro -- has actually not had that bad a year, certainly against the dollar. Even with Greece on the brink and Italy sending ripples of fear across financial markets, the single currency is still up 1.4 percent against the greenback for the year to date.
There are lots of reasons for this. The dollar is subject to its country's own debt crisis, negligible interest rates and various forms of quantitative easing money printing -- all of which weaken FX demand. There is also some evidence that euro investors are bring their money home, as the super-low yields on 10-year German bonds attest.
Finally -- and this is a bit of a stretch -- some investors reckon that if a hard core euro emerges from the current debacle, it could be a buy. Thanos Papasavvas, head of currency management at Investec Asset Management, says:
Let's assume there is some sort of breakup ... if the euro is the currency of a potentially core set of economies, then it would be an incredibly strong currency
Of course, there is the question of whether $1.36 or thereabouts represents a strong euro against the dollar. Lots of people, for example, tend to judge it by the $1.17 rate at which the euro was introduced. But the following graph suggests that if you give the euro a longer historical life, it is not all that much above its average value. Still higher than some might have expected give the crisis that is threatening it entire survival.
from Global Investing:
Are global investors slow to move on euro break-up risk?
No longer an idle "what if" game, investors are actively debating the chance of a breakup of the euro as a creditor strike in the zone's largest government bond market sends Italian debt yields into the stratosphere -- or at least beyond the circa 7% levels where government funding is seen as sustainable over time. Emergency funding for Italy, along the lines of bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal over the past two years, may now be needed but no one's sure there's enough money available -- in large part due to Germany's refusal to contemplate either a bigger bailout fund or open-ended debt purchases from the European Central Bank as a lender of last resort.
So, if Germany doesn't move significantly on any of those issues (or at least not without protracted, soul-searching domestic debates and/or tortuous EU Treaty changes), creditor strikes can reasonably be expected to spread elsewhere in the zone until some clarity is restored. The fog surrounding the functioning and makeup of the EFSF rescue fund and now Italian and Greek elections early next year -- not to mention the precise role of the ECB in all this going forward -- just thickens. Why invest/lend to these countries now with all those imponderables.
Where it all pans out is now anyone's guess, but an eventual collapse of the single currency can't be ruled out now as at least one possible if not likely outcome. The global consequences, according to many economists, are almost incalculable. HSBC, for example, said in September that a euro break-up would lead to a shocking global depression.
A euro break-up would be a disaster, threatening another Great Depression. Cross-border holdings of assets and liabilities within the eurozone have risen dramatically, leading to a tangled web of mutual financial dependency. With the re-introduction of national currencies, disentanglement would proceed at a rate of knots, undermining financial systems, generating massive currency moves, threatening hyper-inflation in the periphery and triggering economic collapse in the core.
So world markets outside the debt markets in question should be suffering a paroxysm right now, right?
Well, not so. World equities are higher over the past week and -- even through all the Greek and Italian political mayhem and crisis summits -- they are basically little changed since August. Global oil prices are basically net unchanged since mid-year and benchmark shipping prices are still up about 20 percent. Financial "fear indices" such as Wall St volatility gauges are little changed on net since August.
So is all the action just in shunned euro zone securities? Well, aside from the ailing Greek and Italian government debt markets, not really. Euro zone banks have been hit hard since the start of the year but are still up substantially from September lows. Even the euro/dollar exchange rate, althouth down about 5% from midyear as the ECB shaped up to reverse early year interest rate rises, has done precious little net net since the first week of September.
It seems unlikely any other nation of the world would want to have it’s currency and people abused as much as the dollar is, in our current status as reserve currency. Name one country that could withstand that kind of abuse, and survive, or benefit? None.