MacroScope

Financial markets on Thursday were starkly disappointed with the European Central Bank and its president, Mario Draghi. He had promised recently to do everything in his power to save the euro and yet announced no new bond-buying at the central bank’s latest meeting. Riskier assets sold off and safe-haven securities benefitted.

But Francesco Garzarelli of Goldman Sachs, Draghi’s former employer, has a different take on the matter:

We see a material change in the central bank’s approach to the crisis, and a coherent interplay between fiscal and monetary policy. The underwhelming part of today’s announcements lies in the lack of details on the asset purchases and other measures to support the private sector. But it appears that these will have more structure around them than the SMP (Securities Markets Program).

Since June 29, Garzarelli has recommended long positions in five-year Italy, Spain and Ireland bonds. He reiterated that stance going into the ECB meeting.

Garzarelli said the conditionality associated with European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) procedures seems “inevitable given the trend towards more intrusive cross-country scrutiny” over fiscal and structural policies.

Ten-year Spanish government bond yields hit their highest levels since the euro was created – above 7 percent – on growing doubts that the euro zone’s fourth largest economy will be able to avoid a full-blown sovereign bailout.

News that Spain’s heavily indebted eastern region of Valencia would ask Madrid for financial help reinforced concerns the country may eventually run out of funds. The rubber-stamping of a rescue package for Spain’s troubled banking sector did little to allay concerns.

Short-dated bonds came under particular pressure, flattening the Spanish yield curve further in a sign of mounting credit worries. Five-year bond yields hit a euro-era high of 6.928 percent, flirting with the widely dreaded 7 percent mark.

German Bund futures have just had their second straight week of losses. This has left many scratching their heads given the timing – right before Greek elections that could decide the country’s future in the euro and the next phase of the euro zone debt crisis. That sort of uncertainty would normally bolster bunds, which are seen as a safe-haven because of the country’s economic strength.

To explain the move, analysts pointed to profit-taking on recent hefty gains, and to a bout of long-dated supply from highly-rated Austria, the Netherlands and the European Financial Stability Fund this week. They also noted changes in Danish pension fund rules as an additional technical factor reducing demand for longer-dated German debt.

The losses, however, have also prompted some debate about whether contagion is spreading to Germany, the euro zone’s largest economy.

Are politicians playing chicken with central bankers? More to the point, if the U.S. Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank step up, yet again, to protect their economies from the global slowdown, will it take U.S., German, Spanish, Italian, Greek and other governments off the hook?

Such questions are swirling as Europe’s financial crisis boils and starts to bubble over into Asia and the Americas. Expectations are growing that the Fed will take more monetary policy action when it meets June 19-20. The messy possibility that Greece could exit the euro zone was not enough to prompt the ECB to cut interest rates last week – and that was before a deal over the weekend to bail out Spanish banks was dismissed by markets as just another kick of the can. Underlining the standoff between monetary and fiscal policymakers, ECB President Mario Draghi told European Parliament this on May 31:

Can the ECB fill the vacuum of lack of action by national governments on fiscal growth? The answer is no.

100 billion used to be a big number. These days, it barely buys you a little time.

Euro zone finance ministers agreed on Saturday to lend Spain up to 100 billion euros ($125 billion) to shore up its ailing banks and Madrid said it would specify precisely how much it needs once independent audits report in just over a week. 

A bailout for Spain’s banks, struggling with bad debts since a property bubble burst, would make it the fourth country to seek assistance since the region’s debt crisis began, after Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Despite all the flashing yellow signs in the global economy, banking sector forecasters are sticking – if a bit uneasily – to their modestly optimistic outlook. Still, a group of economists from the American Bankers Association, a banking lobby that presented its latest economic projections to Federal Reserve officials this week, highlighted plenty of risks. Chief among them were financial contagion from Europe and sharp fiscal adjustments in the United States.

They see U.S. gross domestic product expanding at a pretty subdued 2.2 percent this year, and then slowing to 2 percent in 2013. The forecast assumes that Europe will come to some sort of resolution that puts a floor under its troubled debt markets. Even so, the ABA committee saw a 55 percent chance that one or more countries would exit the euro, with Greece topping the list.

At a press conference on Friday presenting the group ‘s findings, George Mokrzan, chair of the committee and economist at Huntington Bancorporation in Columbus, Ohio, said one worrisome factor for the U.S. economy  was the lack of income growth for most American workers. He said this could crimp consumer spending, which accounts for the vast bulk of U.S. economic activity.

If anything positive can be said to have come out of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, it may be that the theory arguing major economies could “decouple” from one another in times of stress was roundly disproved. Now that Europe is the world’s troublesome epicenter, economists are already on the lookout for how ructions there will reverberate elsewhere.

Luis Oganes and his team of Latin America economists at JP Morgan say Europe’s slowdown is already affecting the region – and may continue to do so for some time. The bank this week downgraded its forecasts for Brazilian economic growth this year to 2.1 percent from 2.9 percent, and it sees Colombia’s expansion softening as well. More broadly, it outlined some key ways in which Latin American economies stand to lose from a prolonged crisis in Europe.

Latin America has exhibited an above-unit beta to growth shocks in the U.S. and the euro area over the past decade; resilient U.S. growth until now had offset some of the pressure coming from lower Euro area growth, but U.S. activity is now weakening too.

Many market analysts consider a deeper fiscal union the only way to hold together a troubled euro zone. And while Germany continues to loudly reaffirm its long-standing opposition to shared euro zone bonds, the region is in many ways already headed towards implicit mutual responsibility for national debts. Berlin will likely come under increasing pressure to succumb, especially now that “core” European countries are entering the crosshairs of speculators .

The region’s complex TARGET2 payments system, which hosts payment flows between euro zone member states, suggests there is already a good deal of risk-sharing implicit in regional structures, not to mention the exposure the European Central Bank has to peripheral debt. That shared liability may fall short of the kind of joint risk-taking foreseen for a common bond, where one country is responsible for the non-payment of debt by another.

But analysts say the build-up of imbalances in the system – as the ECB replaced private sector lending which dried up for peripheral countries – reflects the latest in a number of crisis-fighting steps that have increased regional integration.

Additional Reporting by Andy Bruce and polling by Rahul Karunakar and Sumanta Dey.

As Europe’s crisis drags on, the prospect of a Japanese-style lost decade of economic malaise is becoming increasingly real, according to a new poll. Half of the bond strategists and economists surveyed by Reuters are now expecting just such an outcome.

Many market participants have dismissed the fall of two-year German bond yields below their Japanese counterparts as being merely a result of a crisis-fueled flight to quality bid. Two-year German yields are now close to zero, offering returns of only 0.02 percent. By contrast, equivalent Japanese bonds are yielding 0.11 percent.

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.”