With the ECB doling out almost half a trillion Euros of 1 percent three-year loans to European banks, I am made to think of Latin America in the 1980s. Remember that the Latin American crisis started in Mexico in the autumn of 1982, but it wasn’t actually sorted out until 1989 with the Brady bonds deal (not very clearly explained here). In between, the Fed and other central banks conspired to keep the banks that had lent way too much to Latin America alive.
Maybe the ECB can do that with Europe. If it lends enough cheap money to European banks, perhaps enough of it will be spent by the ‘private’ financial sector on government debt to keep all countries in the Euro. Then the ECB can wait for the US economy to recover and restructure all the debt in a better economic environment — much as the US did at the end of the 80s rather than in the early 80s recession. Southern Europe, like Latin America, just has to put up with a lost decade of growth and steady capital flight. Which is hardly a new thing.
This scenario doesn’t really feel likely to me. Above all Italy and Spain are way more important to aggregate rich-country demand than 1980s Latin America was. Italy may want to think it is Mexico, but actually it is France behaving like Argentina. If you know what I mean.
Which seems to lead to the conclusion that this baby’s gonna blow. Oh dear. Did I mention the IMF before?
It is about a new IMF report highlighting cross-border risks from uncontrolled capital flows. This from the agency which helped global banks rape half the world by campaigning for the premature lifting of capital controls in Latin America and Asia in the 1970s and 80s. (You will remember that the IMF was trying to make the abolition of all capital controls an objective in its Articles of Association in the midst of the Asian financial crisis in 1997.)
The FT is apparently unaware of the ironies inherent in an article of this nature. One era just segues into another.
It reminds us, as Mario Monti goes to work, that the Italian debt buck stops in France.
For it is the French banking system that has a net exposure to Italy of something over US$350 billion.
When the history of recent world banking is written, US and British bankers will take the prize for unadulterated, venal greed and selfishness.
But French bankers must surely lift the trophy in the combined greed-with-stupidity category.
The French liability in Italy is about 15 percent of French GDP. Which particular risk model were the French banks running when they decided that was a good idea?
Time for Giuliano Mignini to investigate. The yield on Italian debt has hit seven percent. Which is the same as the number of deadly sins committed by the Italian prime minister. Every week, which in turn has seven days. And today is only just more than seven days after Halloween, the diabolical festival when Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox, give or take a day, hatched their Satanic ritual murder plot. In Perugia. Whose name has seven letters.
It is soooooooo obvious that everything in the whole world is a conspiracy. How can anyone be expected to take action when confronted by forces beyond our control?
Frankly, they can’t. Which is why Italy’s professional class is doing nothing as the country goes down the tubes.
Let Rome burn!
The images will at least form a good backdrop for a Dolce and Gabbana advertising campaign. Sicilian peasant chic — combining glamour, stoicism and passion — is surely the perfect day-wear for the modern cataclysmic financial crisis. Not to mention a great metaphor for a society living on bullshit.
Prime Minister Nero putting in a bunga-bunga order last night.
Worth a read:
Nouriel Roubini reposts what he said about Italy at Davos in 2006. Roubini’s analysis led to a bizarre racial outburst from finance minister Giulio Tremonti, the former professor of ethics who was recently busted renting a Rome apartment for cash.
Only in Italy do markets bounce, the currency strengthen, and gold weaken when the leader of political ‘right’ says he will step down (in order, as the traditional Italian formulation has it, to spend more time with his bunga-bunga girls).
Of course Sil hasn’t said when he will go.
As if to remind us that whatever the Greeks can do badly, the Italians can do at least as badly, this limp political comedy will continue.
Meanwhile, the IMF has been invited to Rome, which will give staffers a pre-change-of-government chance to reflect on what actually needs doing to keep Italy in the Euro. Most economists quoted in the press focus on the need to deflate. But this is impractical — Italians couldn’t take the deflation any more than Greeks could. No society can watch its real incomes shrink by a quarter or a third in order to make economists’ graphs look the way they ought to.
The only real way forward for Italy is very serious structural reforms which unlock fairly quick productivity gains and hence growth.
There is no theoretical reason why this cannot happen.
However, the job that will confront the IMF if it is called in to run a programme — which I continue to believe it will be — would exceed anything it has undertaken before.
Not only the labour market and outsize public sector need to be overhauled, but the entire justice system has to be reworked.
Can a foreign agency do such things outside the settlement terms of a catastrophic war? I suspect not. Which leaves two choices. Either give Italy German money and accept the country will not change and will remain a fiscal burden on the centre. Or kick Italy out of the Euro and refocus the group on a more northerly European caucus of states that can actually deliver political, social and fiscal integration.
Here is an interesting panel discussion about the Icelandic financial crisis. It is chaired by Martin Wolf (see blogroll), and includes Paul Krugman (see blogroll), Simon Johnson (see blogroll), a deputy director of the IMF, the current head of the Icelandic central bank, and another knowledgeable Icelander.
To recap: Iceland had by some measures the worst financial crisis in the history of the world (Wiki summary here.). However, because there was zero chance the country could bail out its banks — and it is not a Euro area member — they had to go bust, capital controls were introduced, and foreign wholesale funders of the Icelandic banks took the main financial hit. The obvious comparison is with Ireland, which has a similar-size crisis but is in the Euro and partly as a result was forced to go the bank rescue route. So, while Iceland has written off much of its bad debt and is recovering, Ireland is presently set to honour every European cent it owes and faces a decade of painful adjustment.
The event was filmed this week and runs to 1.5 hours. It is just about worth watching the whole thing, but if you don’t have time, scroll through and check these highlights as a taster menu of the way the world has changed — intellectually — as a result of the global financial crisis.
6 mins: Martin Wolf talks about the previously unthinkable phenomenon of the IMF admitting to mistakes.
30 mins: An IMF deputy director actually says: ‘Capital controls were probably the best thing that could be done at the time’. Remember that when the Asian crisis broke in 1997 the IMF was trying to change its articles of association to make a battle against capital controls a centre-piece of its mandate.
57 mins: Martin Wolf talks about the ‘new, cuddly IMF’.
62 mins: The point is made that the lessons of Latin America 1982 and south-east Asia 1997 have were finally learnt such that they could benefit a country (Iceland) whose population is the size of a mid-western town in the US. Roughly speaking, bad US, IMF and World Bank policies were used on approximately 1 billion people in order to learn positive lessons that have been applied to 300,000 people.
89 mins: Martin Wolf talks about the Vickers plan for UK financial sector reform, which he refers to as ‘modern Glass Steagall’. I think it would be fair to say he hopes that this is what it will turn out to be, since the ring-fencing strategy put forward by the final Vickers report has not in fact been tried before.
Final thought: the very moment when the IMF is said to have become ‘cuddly’ may be the one when it needs to not be cuddly. Italy, which I continue to believe will require IMF intervention, cries out for the toughest and most invasive kind of IMF action if it is to remain in the Euro area. This includes intervention in institutional areas like legal system reform where the Fund has never previously (to my knowledge) been active. Just when the IMF decided to be nice and listen to Icelandic policy makers, it needs to be Mr. Bad Cop to have any chance with Italian ones. In saying this, I stand by my own preference for Italy to be pushed out of the EU and forced to confront its problems itself — because only that will really force the country to grow up.
It’s another fudge from Europe. The European Financial Stability Fund has been ‘theoretically’ expanded through approved leverage to perhaps Euro1 trillion. Private holders of Greek bonds will ‘theoretically’ take a 50 percent hair-cut, though no details have really been agreed. Silvio Berlusconi has delivered a letter ripe with fulsome promises of structural reform in Italy, to add to lots of other fulsome promises he made before.
It was clear in recent days the markets were ready to accept some more thin European gruel as ‘good news’. Corporate earnings in the US continue to be strong and the latest US GDP figures suggest the American economy is slowly crawling away from the abyss. The very slow improvement in the US macro numbers is the bigger economic story, albeit less trumpeted in the press.
The European train wreck waiting to happen has been moved back down the line. But not far. In the absence of any substantive structural change in Italy, a train wreck there will be. The base case remains remains an Italian fiscal crisis and IMF intervention in the absence of any EU capacity to address the problem.
In the mean time, Italy’s negotiating position can only be strengthened by the ECB’s continued purchases of its debt (EU debt socialisation by the back door) and by the Greek debt hair-cut (What about us, another ‘young’, ’peripheral’ European state?). Time to write about something else for a while.
Next day update:
Porco cane! Rome auctions some debt this morning and the market still wants 6 percent (FT sub needed)… In fact the cost of Italian public debt has gone up to a new record. Is it possible that people outside the Italian elite are less stupid than they thought?
Italian debt yields are back over 6 percent. So France and Germany react by announcing that Sunday’s last-chance saloon summit on European debt and economic restructuring will go ahead, but won’t reach any decisions. Instead there might be another summit on Wednesday. Or Thursday. Or next weekend. Maybe Sarko and Merkel are hoping the markets will really fall apart so they can be seen to be forced to do something. This is the most likely endgame. But of course if they are forced by a market crisis, France and Germany will react with a bail-out package rather than a new political agreement that puts the EU on a sustainable track to being the world’s most desirable economic bloc to live in. That would involve a political and institutional agreement, not a conclave of thieving banker types trying to structure the EFSF in a sufficiently complex way that the world is conned into thinking that all is well.
While pondering this, I check the press at the end of the day and am saddened to discover that Berlusconi is dead. ‘Maverick dictator with little regard for reality’ says the headline of the obit in the FT (sub needed). It is a bit tough to say of a deceased G8 leader that he ‘had a grandiose vision of himself and of his country’s place in history’. None the less, Italians certainly ‘were impoverished and repressed by his policies but nonetheless forced to pay homage to the illusion that he was a political visionary’. However, surely the FT has got it wrong with the claim that Berlusconi was born in a tent near Sirte in 1942? Wasn’t he born in Milan in 1936?
The latest remarks of European leaders about the EU crisis, and the markets’ positive response, leave me at a loss to understand what is going on. The idea seems to be that having a bit more argument about the shape of a Greek debt write-off, and moving forward with the recapitalisation of banks, is all that needs to be done.
The rhetoric assumes that this is a financial crisis. It isn’t. At heart this is a political crisis of the EU. It requires two societies — Greece and Italy — to decide whether they are going to adjust to the requirements of EU- and Eurozone membership. There are good arguments why both these states might want to cut and run. If they really cannot adjust their institutional frameworks to allow them to compete at European levels, they are better off outside the union.
But whatever is decided, the problem is a political one with only political solutions. Martin Wolf (FT sub needed) seems to think the same.
You will remember that back at the start of August in Banking the Sopranos I took a look at Italy’s debt profile and suggested that a) the markets were going to realise that Italy is a much worse risk than Spain and b) that the scale of the Italian liability is such that the power of extortion lay with the Italian side in its dealings with the EU. The Italian government then — in a stroke of comic genius — promised to legislate to make itself solvent.
Two months later we have senior IMF officials saying the Fund is ready to buy Italian debt, and northern Europe (Germany) readying to recapitalise banks such that they can survive big write-downs in ‘peripheral’ country sovereign bonds. The Sopranos look to be almost home and dry without even having to make Mrs Merkel an offer she can’t refuse.
But have the Germans really thought this through? Even if German banks had to write down 50 percent of the value of their (Greek and) Italian bonds they could manage with government back-stop of Euro100 billion, or less than 3 percent of GDP. It is a heavy price, but the return would include pushing Italy out of the Euro as a very profound lesson to other EU miscreants (particularly the eastern European periphery) and giving a world-first lesson about moral hazard to the banking sector, which would eventually have to pay off the write-down. People say that Italy is an important market for Germany, but given the condition of the place it is not going to be a growth opportunity for anyone. Sometimes, as the Chinese say, you need to cut a monkey’s head off to scare the chickens.
I say all this as someone whose family assets are largely concentrated in Italy. We have more than most to lose. And yet I think it would be better to throw Italy to the dogs than to move forward with a bail-out that enforces no fundamental structural change. Either Italy should be inside the Euro with a dramatic structural reform programme led by the IMF, or else outside it with a debt reduction but no one to turn to but itself. As I have written before, if Europe wants a more worthy cause for its patience, why not try Turkey?
More:
There are FT discussions of latest European bank bail-out plans here and here (sub needed).
Baseline Scenario
About the US economy, mostly. These boys are not too funny (they are economists) but they put in serious hours on this site and it is worth reading. Johnson is a Brit former IMF economist with perspective. Updated daily.
John Kay
About Britain and micro-economic issues. Research-heavy analysis rather than opinion. One of the few people with really clear ideas on bank regulation, but not yet (for me) fully thought through.
Krugman
Posts multiple times a day cos he’s manic. I was at a boring conference with him where he appeared to take frantic notes. Later transpired all he had written on his pad was ‘I need a beer’, about one hundred times. Still got Nobel.
Martin Wolf (FT sub needed)
Particularly good on Europe. During his life, Wolf has fallen in love with — and then become disillusioned by — the Labour Party, the World Bank, and perhaps now globalisation. The constant is his hunger for answers.
The Big Lychee
About Hong Kong. Affiliated with Hemlock, the exquisitely misanthropic, underemployed, billionaire’s gweilo running dog. Original Hemlock files available. Updated every day, because the author has a huge salary and nothing better to do.
