MacroScope

It wasn’t just the Nikkei. Euro zone government bonds rallied following Japan’s announcement of a massive new monetary stimulus. That sent yields on the debt of several euro zone countries to record lows on bets that Japanese investors might be switching out of Japanese government bonds into euro zone paper, or might soon do so.

The Bank of Japan on Thursday announced extraordinary stimulus steps to revive the world’s third-largest economy, vowing to inject about $1.4 trillion into the financial system in less than two years in a dose of shock therapy to end two decades of deflation.

Austrian, Dutch, French and Belgian borrowing costs over ten years fell to record lows as investors piled into euro zone debt offering a pick-up over Germany. The bond rally was led by 10- and 30-year maturities after the BOJ said it would double its holdings of long-term government bonds.

According to one trader:

There is no question that Asian demand for semi-core is quite strong and I think, in light of yesterday’s BOJ move, the expectation is that that’s going to continue.

Philip Tyson, strategist at ICAP, told Reuters Insider there had been talk of life insurance companies switching out of Japanese bonds overnight in search of yield, potentially into European debt.

Despite Mario Draghi’s game changer, or potential game changer, the coming week’s events still have the power to shape the path of the euro zone debt crisis in a quite decisive way, regardless of the European Central Bank’s offer to buy as many government bonds as needed to buy politicians time to do their work.

The nuclear event would be the German constitutional court ruling on Wednesday that the bloc’s new ESM rescue fund should not come into being, which would leave the ECB’s plans in tatters since its intervention requires a country to seek help from the rescue funds first and the ESM’s predecessor, the EFSF, looks distinctly threadbare. That is unlikely to happen given the court’s previous history but it could well add conditions demanding greater German parliamentary scrutiny and even a future referendum on deeper European integration. For the time being though, the markets are likely to take a binary view. ‘Yes’ to the ESM good, ‘No’ very bad.

Dutch elections on the same day look to have been robbed of some of their potential drama with the firebrand hard-left socialists now slipping in the polls and the fiscally conservative Liberals neck-and-neck with the likeminded centre-left Labour party. But there are no guarantees and Germany could yet be robbed of one of its staunchest allies in the debt crisis debate.

There is a groundswell building in the euro zone that austerity drives should be tempered.

France’s Francois Hollande, favourite to take the presidency next month, said last night that  leaders across Europe were awaiting his election to back away from German-led austerity, and even ECB President Mario Draghi called yesterday for a growth pact.

He was rather opaque on how – although he was clear the European Central Bank would not be doing anything more — but his colleague Joerg Asmussen was a little more forthcoming, saying some EU structural funds could be funneled to countries in crisis to boost employment. These sort of ideas are actively part of the mix and could well be enacted at the June EU summit.

ECB policymakers from Mario Draghi down will come at us from all angles today. Expect a united front on the main theme of the moment; calls for it to consider yet more liquidity operations essentially creating money and/or resuming its government bond-buying programme. That call was first heard at the IMF spring meeting over the weekend and the ECB president’s response could hardly have been clearer, saying: “None of the advice of the IMF has been discussed by the Governing Council, in recent times at least”.

Since then a number of his colleagues have followed up. The message: they are looking more to inflation now and banks and governments have to put their own houses in order after the ECB gave them time with its colossal three-year money-creating exercise.
The ECB’s man in Spain, Gonzalez-Paramo, is already out this morning saying Spain will not struggle to meet its debt issuance target this year despite its rising yields.

The ECB will, of course, act if the crisis drives Europe right back to the brink, it’s mandate will pretty much demand it at that stage but we’re not anywhere near there yet – contrary to what many in the markets believe.

So the euro zone debt crisis morphs again and there is a hint of schadenfreude about the Dutch, who lectured and hectored the Greeks, now falling into the same mire.

The Dutch premier, Mark Rutte, will probably try to cobble together an unholy alliance in parliament in order to meet an April 30 EU deadline for it to present budget plans for the next year. But with elections not until late June at the earliest, there will be an unnerving period of vacuum for the markets and no guarantee that opposition parties will play ball and allow a budget to be put together.

Given all that, today’s Dutch bond auction, not normally a cause for alarm or excitement, is thrown into sharp relief. Expect yields to spiral although the small amount on offer means the paper will be sold. Italy is selling zero-coupon and inflation-linked bonds while Spain,  which remains front and centre despite the Netherlands’ travails, will probably see borrowing costs double when it sells up to 2 billion euros of 3- and 6-month treasury bills. Spanish 10-year yields poked above the pivotal 6 percent level again yesterday as the Dutch government collapse rocked markets. The Bank of Spain confirmed on Monday that a new recession has taken hold.

The Netherlands has become the latest country to come into the firing line of the euro zone crisis.

The cost of insuring five-year Dutch debt against default jumped to its highest since January as the government’s failure to agree on budget cuts spiraled into a political crisis and cast doubt over its support for future euro zone measures.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte offered to resign on Monday, creating a political vacuum in a country which strongly backed an EU fiscal treaty.

An action-packed weekend with both good and bad news for the euro zone, which may — net — leave its prospects little clearer.

Item 1: The IMF came up with $430 billion in new firepower to contain the euro zone-led world economic crisis, although some of the money will only be delivered by the BRICS once they have more sway at the Fund. Nonetheless, the figure at least matches expectations and could give markets pause for thought. The official line is that it is for non-euro countries caught up in the maelstrom but no one really believes that. If a Spain is teetering, IMF funds will be there. Together with the 500 billion euros rescue fund set up by the euro zone, there is still barely enough to ringfence both Italy and Spain if it came to it. But will it come to it?

Item 2: Socialist Francois Hollande came out top in the first round of the French presidential election and is now a warm favourite to win. Some fear that could weaken the Franco-German motor which must be humming smoothly if further crisis-fighting measures are to be convincing. Others say he is essentially a centrist who, either way, will be constrained by the realities of the euro zone situation. Domestically, his focus on tax rises over spending cuts and a slower timetable for cuts could drive up French borrowing costs. Attempts by Hollande and President Nicola Sarkozy to woo the substantial votes that went to the far right and far left could lead to some nerve-jangling campaigning messages for the markets to swallow in the run-up to the May 6 second round.

A day for central bankers and maybe the hint of a row brewing within the ECB. After days of jitters, euro zone bond markets were calmed a little this week when ECB policymaker Benoit Coure said the central bank’s government bond-buying programme could be revived if Spain started teetering.

That is decidedly not what the orthodoxists in Frankfurt would have wanted to hear. They are already worried that the creation of more than a trillion euros of three-year money could be stoking future inflation and creating addicted banks and feel that the bond-buying programme crosses a red line — that the ECB should not fund governments.

We know Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann has been leading the charge to at least talk about an exit strategy from the ECB’s extraordinary policy stance – something the top man, Mario Draghi, slapped down pretty bluntly last week — and Orphanides, the ECB man from Cyprus, was out last night saying individual central bankers should not be making any commitments about bond-buying, a clear swipe at Coure.

Big debt test for Italy which will sell 8 billion euros or more of longer-dated bonds. A short-term T-bill sale went okay on Wednesday but a day before, the secondary market reacted negatively to a sale of zero-coupon and inflation-linked bonds, pushing Italian yields higher.

The glut of ECB three-year money has ensured Italian and Spanish auctions have sailed out of the door so far this year but there will be no more largesse from the central bank so be on the look out for signs of that support fading. Analysts expect this sale to go well with Italian banks wading in again.

Euro zone money supply data on Wednesday showed Spanish and Italian banks stocked up on government bonds in February – and that was before the ECB’s second instalment of money creation to the tune of 500 billion euros. So bond sales should be underpinned for some time yet though it is clear that the central bank has bought policymakers time rather than solved the root problems.

The spotlight swings firmly on to Italy where Prime Minister Mario Monti is meeting trade unions and employers in an attempt to push through labour reforms which he hopes will galvanise the economy. The largest union has said a deal is “impossible” by an end-of-week deadline despite signs the government is watering down the  measures.

This is big stuff. A number of key factors have helped move the euro zone debt crisis on from critical to chronic; top of the list was the ECB’s creation of a trillion euros of three-year money but not far behind came the elevation of Monti and the hope invested in him that he can turn the Italian economy around. If the euro zone’s fourth largest economy fell over, the currency bloc really would be on the skids. He must convince markets – which remain becalmed for now – that he can raise Italy’s trend growth rate if its 120 percent of GDP debt pile is ever to be eaten into.

If faith in the technocrat premier wanes, it could have a significant effect on currently benign investor sentiment towards the euro zone.