MacroScope

Greece’s creditors have essentially let it off the hook by overwhelmingly agreeing to take a 74 percent loss.  So what better time to  remember  one of the first times Athens got in trouble with paying its debts.

In 490 BC, the bucolic plains before the town of Marathon were the site of a bloodbath. Invading Persians  lost a key battle against Greeks, who were led by the great Athenian warrior Kallimachos, aka Callimachus.

The trouble is, Kallimachos shares some of the difficulty with numbers that  modern Greek leaders appear to have.  Before launching himself upon the  Persians,  he  pledged to sacrifice a young goat to the Gods for every enemy that was killed.

His troops slaughtered some 6,400 invaders. Unfortunately the Athenians didn’t have that many young goats. So they had to spread the repayment and legend has it that it took them a century to honour the pledge.

Apparently, Zeus and the other Gods had not heard of the Institute of International Finance and were unwilling to take a 74 percent cut in goats.

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.

At this stage in the euro zone crisis, we probably don’t need to be reminded how uncompetitive the peripheral economies are. (Arguably, of course, they would not be economically peripheral if they were more competitive, but that is for tautologists to debate).  The United Nations, in the form of UNCTAD, has just pinpointed another weakness, however — huge underperformance  in foreign directed investing, or FDI.

The numbers it has just released only go as far as 2010, so the real crisis cauldron has yet to come.  But they show that Greece and Italy have been punching way below their weight.

Greece has attracted a relatively small amount of foreign direct investment compared to other countries in the European Union (EU). In 2010, Greece’s share in the EU’s GDP was 1.9 per cent. In the same year, however, the inward FDI stock of Greece amounted to €26.2 billion ($35.0 billion), or less than 0.5 percent of the combined FDI stock of EU countries. Similarly, Greece’s share in the total outward FDI stock of EU countries was 0.4 per cent.

S&P on Monday cut Greece’s ratings to “selective default” but said it would consider the default “cured” after Greece completes its debt exchange. At that point, S&P plans on upgrading the country to CCC. Here is the full statement S&P issued alongside the decision:

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services said today that it has lowered its ‘CC’ long-term and ‘C’ short-term sovereign credit ratings on the Hellenic Republic (Greece) to ‘SD’ (selective default).

Our recovery rating of ’4′ on Greece’s foreign-currency issue ratings is unchanged. Our country transfer and convertibility (T&C) assessment for Greece, as for all other eurozone members, remains ‘AAA’.

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.

Greeks smashing windows and setting fire to shops and banks in a fury of opposition to yet more austerity is gripping.  But it is hardly unique. A few years ago there were similar scenes for weeks after police shot a 15-year old schoolboy.  And back when I lived there, U.S. President Bill Clinton was treated to a similar welcome -- mainly because of his military assault on Serbia (a fellow Christian Orthodox nation) during the Kosovo conflict.

There are doubtless degrees. The latest level of destruction was the worst since widespread riots in 2008 -- and austerity being imposed on Greeks is very painful. But it is worth noting that there are two underlying elements than make such uprisings more common in Greece than elsewhere.

The first is a division in Greek society that goes back to at least the end of the second world war. The civil war that followed the end of the German occupation was brutal and split the country between those wanting western free market democracy and those favouring Soviet-style communism. This carried though into the 1967-74 junta.

As the crisis in Greece continues, the comparisons with Argentina’s chaotic bankruptcy a decade ago start to look more justified. In Argentina, a bank deposit freeze was the tipping point, triggering mass violent protests. People took to the streets banging pots and pans to protest against an economic collapse that plunged millions into poverty. The government declared a stage of siege and presidents resigned one after another. Greek unemployment and industrial production numbers out yesterday were dreadful but how to they compare to Argentina in late 2001?

The table and charts below show some key economic series in Argentina in the run up to 2002 and after. Argentinean real GDP fell nearly 20% from its peak in 1998 to 2002 -that compares with around a 12% fall so far in Greece. The unemployment rate in Argentina reached a peak of 24% not far above the 21% Greece reported yesterday. On other metrics Greece looks much worse; the IMF puts public debt at 50.8% of GDP in Argentina compared to an expected 166% in Greece this year.

The IMF published its Lessons of the crisis in Argentina in 2003 (approved by Tim Geithner no less). Looking at the conclusions, the IMF faced many problems now becoming familiar in Greece as this passage shows:

Anyone worried about Greece and the potential impact of the euro debt crisis on the world economy should have a chat with Jim O'Neill. O'Neill, the head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management ten years ago coined the BRIC acronym to describe the four biggest emerging economies and perhaps understandably, he is not too perturbed by the outcome of the Greek crisis. Speaking at a recent conference, the man who is often called Mr BRIC, pointed out that China's economy is growing by $1 trillion a year  and that means it is adding the equivalent of a Greece every 4 months. And what if the market turns its guns on Italy, a far larger economy than Greece?  Italy's economy was surpassed in size last year by Brazil, another of the BRICs, O'Neill counters, adding:

"How Italy plays out will be important but people should not exaggerate its global importance.  In the next 12 months the four BRICs will create the equivalent of another Italy."

Emerging economies are cooling now after years of turbo-charged growth. But according to O'Neill, even then they are growing enough to allow the global economy to expand at 4-4.5 percent,  a faster clip than much of the past 30 years. Trade data for last year will soon show that Germany for the first time exported more goods to the four BRICs than to neighbouring France, he said.

At the epicenter of Europe’s financial crisis, Greece has taken a lot of heat for setting off the panic that now threatens to engulf the rest of the continent. One common story line is that inefficient Southern European states are dragging down a more industrious North, a theme we have previously questioned on this blog.

A research note from Marc Chandler, head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, highlights the disconnect between a negative perception of Greek workers with actual readings of hours worked from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

We’ll start with the picture, which pretty much tells the story:

Chandler suggests prejudice has gotten in the way of sound economic analysis:

The conventional narrative about the European debt crisis largely accepts the contention that the periphery of Europe have different work habits and these account to a large extent the economic and financial problems. Yet often time the discussion takes on such ethnocentric dimensions that sometimes it is difficult to see what is real.

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.