MacroScope

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.

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.

Whether or not it's likely or even a good idea, talk of Greece leaving the euro is no longer taboo in either financial or political circles.  What is more, anxiety over the future of the  single currency has reached such a pitch since the infection of the giant Italian bond market that there are many investors talking openly of an unraveling of the entire bloc. But against such an amplified "tail risk",  it's remarkable how stable world financial markets have been over the past few turbulent weeks -- at least outside the ailing sovereign debt markets in question.

Yet, focussing on the possible consequences for Greece of bankruptcy and euro exit has now become an inevitable part of investment reseach and analysis. In a note to clients on Tuesday entitled "Breaking Up is Hard to Do", Bank of New York Mellon strategist Simon Derrick sketched some of the issues.

One issue he pointed out,  and one raised in the September Spiegel online report, was the chance of invoking Article 143 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which permits certain countries to "take protective measures" and which could be used to allow restrictions on the movement of capital in order to prevent a flight of capital abroad.

Europe’s economy is contracting at a steeper rate than most city economists recognise – and not for the first time.

While tiny Greece stole the headlines last week, a calamitous set of business surveys pointed to imminent recession for the enormous euro zone economy. Even a month ago, that was thought unlikely by most economists.

If city economists weren’t employed by global finance institutions, lots of them might make a living by closing barn doors after the horses have fled. Last week’s purchasing managers indexes (PMIs) were further proof of this.

The reigning narrative of Europe’s financial turmoil is that profligate European states, agglomerated all too offensively by a swine-referenced acronym, are forcing the continent’s wealthy, prudent northern countries to come to their rescue. Not so, according to two policy experts who spoke this week at a conference on the euro zone crisis at the University of Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

They argue that labor reforms in Germany prevented the wages of manufacturing workers from rising after monetary union had been completed, making the country more competitive at the expense of its southern peers. Joerg Bibow, a professor of economics at Skidmore College, gives his view of events:

Germany’s wage trends have been the most important cause of the euro zone crisis. Those wage trends created an asymmetric shock that destabilized Europe.

No, that is not a typo in the headline. Greece has long been the focal point of Europe’s crisis. It was the first country to reveal some cracks in a monetary union that lacks a fiscal authority to back it. Indeed, Greek politics were dominating the headlines on Friday, with news that the prime minister had survived a confidence vote in parliament restoring a momentary sense of calm to a still very dramatic situation.

However, Greece’s actual debt load is only large relative to its own small and struggling economy. In the larger context of the euro zone, the actual amount of debt being haggled over is rather puny. Matias Vernengo, a professor of economics at the University of Utah, explains:

When you look at the size of Greece’s debt, which is slightly more than $500 billion, that corresponds more or less to 3 percent of euro zone GDP. It’s a very small amount of debt. The peculiarity of the crisis is that it’s political. It has an economic basis, an imbalance that it’s unable to solve but which is technically simple to solve.

It seems as if almost everyone was surprised by Prime Minister George Papandreou's decision to hold a referendum on the euro zone's bailout package for his country. At the very least, it can probably be said that he is weary of being hammered from all sides --  his own party, the opposition, the people on the street, Germany, the tabloid press, you name it.

A lot will obviously depend on what question is asked. Do you want an end to austerity, would get a clear yes vote. Do you want to leave the euro zone -- perhaps not.

Financial markets, however, do not initially appear content to wait.  Talk of an end-of-year rally is off the table (at least for now).  It's not exactly χάος (chaos) out there, but Papandreou's  experiment  in δημοκρατία (democracy) has sent the whole euro zone project into a new, risky phase.

For all the ifs and buts about the latest euro rescue agreement, one of its most profound market legacies may be to sound the death knell for sovereign credit default swaps -- at least those covering richer developed economies. In short, the agreement reached in Brussels last night outlined a haircut on Greek government bonds of some 50 percent as a way to keep the country's debt mountain sustainable over time. But anyone who had bought default insurance on the debt in the form of CDS would not get compensated as long as the "restructuring" was voluntary, or so says a top lawyer for the International Swaps and Derivatives Association -- the arbiter of CDS contracts.

ISDA general counsel  David Geen said there would be no change in the ruling to account for the size of the haircut:

As far we can see it's still a voluntary arrangement and therefore we are in the same position as we were with the 21 percent when that was agreed (in July)

Covering a summit of European leaders is a bit like covering a soccer match with no ticket for the stadium and no live TV broadcast to watch. The only way you have an idea of the scoreline is from the groans and cheers from inside the ground.

With EU leaders meeting on Brussels on Sunday and again on Wednesday to try to resolve the region's debt crisis, the emergency back-to-back summits look like a game of two halves.

A European Commission spokeswoman said as much on Monday, trying to explain why there had been no major announcements so far on solving the debt crisis: leaders had gone in for half time.

By Gordon Brown
The views expressed are his own.

It was said of European monarchs of a century ago that they learned nothing and forgot nothing.  For three years, as a Greek debt problem has morphed into a full blown euro area crisis, European leaders  have been behind the curve, consistently repeating the same mistake of doing too little too late. But when they meet on Sunday, the time for small measures is over. As the G20 found when it met in London at the height of the  2009 crisis, only a demonstration of policy intent that shows irresistible force will persuade the markets that leaders will do what it takes. An announcement on a new Greek package will not be enough. Nor will it be sufficient to recapitalize the banks. European leaders will have to announce a comprehensive -- around 2 trillion euro -- finance facility; set out a plan to fundamentally reform the euro; and work with the G20 to agree on a coordinated plan for growth.

For three years it has suited leaders across Europe to disguise Europe’s banking problems and, citing the blatant profligacy of Greece, they have defined the European problem as simply a public sector debt problem. And it has suited Europe’s leaders to call for austerity (and if that fails, more austerity) and forget how the inflexibility of the euro is itself dampening prospects for growth, keeping unemployment unacceptably high and weakening Europe’s competitive position in the world today. Indeed, Europe’s share of world output has now fallen to just 18 percent.  And it is a measure of how it is losing out in the growth markets of the future that just 7.5 percent of Europe’s exports go to the emerging markets that are responsible for 70 percent of the world’s growth.

When I attended the first ever meeting of the euro group of leaders in October 2008 there was astonishment when I reported that Europe's banks had bought half America’s subprime mortgages and there was incredulity when I said that European banks were far more at risk than U.S. banks because they were far more highly leveraged. Since 2008, as American banks have tackled their toxic assets, they have written off 4 percent of their loans and raised the equivalent of another 4 percent in new equity.  But euro area banks have written off just 1 percent of their loans, and have raised their capital base by only 0.7 percent, leaving them highly vulnerable even before their exposure to sovereign debt has become a central issue.  Their vulnerability is increased because they have always been far more dependent for their funding on the short term and confidence-dependent wholesale markets, and  countries within the euro zone are able to do far less in the face of capital flight than, say, Britain.