MacroScope

With debate about the balance between growth and austerity well and truly breaking out into the open, flash euro zone PMIs – which have a strong correlation to future GDP — are likely to show why a bit of fiscal stimulus is sorely needed. Talk of a European Central Bank rate cut is growing, euro zone policymakers at the G20 last week began to ponder loosening up on debt-cutting in an attempt to foster some growth and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso added his voice to the debate yesterday, saying the austerity drive had reached its “natural limit”.

Crucially, we haven’t heard similar from Germany but something is afoot, starting with the certainty that the likes of Spain and France will get more time to meet their deficit targets when the Commission makes a ruling next month. Portugal has already been given more leeway and today its finance minister will spell out new spending cuts which are required after the constitutional court threw out Plan A.

It’s a coincidence, but an interesting one, that this debate – frequently voiced in private over many months – has gone public just as THE academic study from 2010 which asserted that as soon as debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP growth is crushed, has been called into question.

France continues to look like the poor cousin of northern Europe. It will also release an annual study of household income and wealth today. Its loss of economic clout is one factor behind the weakening of the French voice in comparison with Germany’s.

One of the saving graces for the likes of Germany has been the ability to export outside the euro zone so a Chinese slowdown would concentrate minds even further. Hey presto, today’s Chinese PMI showed growth in its huge manufacturing sector dipped in April and export orders contracted, a reflection of weakening global demand. Beijing will respond in policy terms if it has to but it is a worry.

The big euro zone development over the weekend was the re-election of ageing Italian President Giorgio Napolitano for a second term. The presumption is that to put himself through this again he must have got pretty serious expressions of intent from the warring political parties that they will strive for some form of grand coalition. That may have been made easier by the resignation of centre-left leader Bersani who was in danger of splitting his own caucus.

If that comes to pass it should push back the timing of fresh elections until next year at least, a welcome turn for markets which feared a new poll could result in an even more fractured outcome and put more power in the hands of the anti-establishment Five Star movement. All that means we should see a significant rally in Italian assets today. That should also benefit other peripheral euro zone bonds. Safe haven German Bund futures have already dipped at the open, Italian bond futures have leapt almost a full point and European stock futures are pointing upwards.

87-year-old Napolitano will address parliament later and could either rush through consultations with the parties or skip that step altogether since he’s already heard from them ad nauseam.

Paul Volcker’s inflation-fighting era as chairman of the Federal Reserve is quite the opposite of today’s U.S. central bank, which is battling to kick start growth and even stave off deflation with trillions in bond purchases. And it is polar opposite of where the Bank of Japan finds itself today, doubling down on easing to lift inflation expectations after two decades of Japanese stagnation. After all, Volcker ratcheted up interest rates in 1979 and the early 1980s to tame the inflation that had been choking the United States.

So it may come as no real surprise that, talking to students and faculty at New York University on Monday, he had a few concerns about where the world’s ultra accommodative central banks are headed.

“There are going to be big losses at central banks at someplace along the line,” he said. “You do all this support of buying longer term securities at very low interest rates; long term interest rates aren’t going to stay where they are forever; at some point losses are going to be taken.”

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.

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.

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.

Cypriot lawmakers are supposed to vote today on a bailout that hits at least some of its bank depositors but the president’s spokesman has said any such legislation is unlikely to pass. This could be brinkmanship but it doesn’t sound like it.

Last night, euro zone finance ministers urged Nicosia to spare depositors with less than 100,000 euros in the bank and hit the richer harder, in order to raise 5.8 billion euros to free up a 10 billion euros bailout. Without it, Cyprus will surely go bankrupt but that is a deal that President Anastasiades baulked at in Brussels over the weekend. The government faces a stark choice: hit those who vote for it and rip up the deposit insurance they thought they had, or clobber the richer (many of them Russians), thus threatening the meltdown of its banking model.

Despite their belated support for the little guy, the euro zone will accept pretty much anything that raises the requisite cash. Germany and others insist the days of bailouts funded solely by taxpayers are over and the Bundestag probably wouldn’t sanction any other sort of deal.

What a weekend. The euro zone crossed a dangerous Rubicon by whacking Cypriot bank depositors as part of a bailout – a dramatic departure from previous aid programmes. The finance ministers insist it is a one-off (as they did for Greece) but if investors and bank customers fear a precedent has been set, there could yet be a serious backwash for the euro zone. And all this for six billion euros? It seems perplexing to say the least although our trawl of the streets of the euro zone periphery has detected little alarm so far.

Markets are voting with their feet. The euro has dropped well over one percent, European stock futures are pointing to losses of two to three percent and the safe haven Bund future has leapt a full point at the open. Italian bond futures have done the reverse, suggesting that in the bond market at least, there is more than a little concern about contagion from Cyprus. “The crisis is back,” one bond trader told us. “Precedent” is the word on everybody’s lips. I’ve used it before but Bank of England Governor Mervyn King produced the definitive line on bank runs – it’s never logical to start one but it sure could be logical to join one.

To muddy the waters further, the Cypriots are trying to renegotiate the deal to ease the 6.5 percent burden on smaller depositors and raise it on the richer (from 9.9 percent). This suggests that the president fears that today’s parliamentary vote may be lost without changes. If it is lost – no party has a majority and three of them said yesterday they wouldn’t support the programme – we’re in for a real rollercoaster as everyone scrambles to avoid a default, with all the reputational damage that will do to the euro zone. At that point, we could probably kiss goodbye to the five months of calm imposed by the European Central Bank and its “do whatever it takes” pledge.

We had thought the end-of-week EU summit was going to be a lacklustre affair but things are starting to bubble up.

Ireland announced last night it would issue its first new 10-year bond since it was bailed out in 2010. It sounds like the books on the syndicated issue will open today with dealers predicting strong demand. This is a crucial step in Dublin becoming the success story the euro zone desperately craves. Some European Central Bank policymakers have said the bank’s bond-buying programme could be deployed to help Ireland once it has demonstrated its ability to issue debt in a variety of maturities. Others, notably Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann, appear less keen on the idea.

With yields below four percent (they peaked above 15 percent in 2011) and needing to raise only a few billion in debt this year, it’s not clear that Ireland even needs ECB help to put the bailout behind it, but bond-buying support would certainly seal its exit and also show the ECB’s intent to markets. Further down the line, it will be worth pondering whether Ireland’s journey demonstrates that austerity was the right medicine. Plenty of euro zone policymakers will say so. The interesting question to address would be whether Dublin could have got there faster with more leeway to boost growth and therefore tax revenues.