Archive - Feb 28, 2010 - Story

Read the following from Goldman's Jim O'Neill, take two tablets of hopium, and first thing tomorrow use REDI to buy 10 times your net worth in BRIC stocks - buy indiscriminately - they are all going up, up, up. Also don't forget to buy some Man U leaps. After all with a hundred years of momentum behind you (and billions of dollars spent in lobbying to preserve the status quo) it is not as if something new can ever come out of left field (both literally and metaphorically). At least Goldman's permabullish analyst has had the chance to read the Goldman Monthly FX Analyst report, which substantially dropped its $/BRL 3/6/9 month targets from R$1.60, R$1.65 and R$1.75 to R$1.75, R$1.85 and R$1.90. O'Neill notes: "it does appear [theReal is] overvalued" Needless to say, we were looking forward to this happening for quite some time. And as much as Goldman touts the BRICs, we are confident that our own creation, the STUPIDs, will be getting much more airtime over the next decade.

The bond deal that was so very much rumored was going to get done in mid (and at most late) February, never really took off. The reason: with each passing day, investors (what little is left of them) are demanding a greater and greater premium, as the country now has less than 3 weeks of cash left at the current cash burn rate. And this is before even counting for €16 billion in maturities coming up through May. According to BusinessWeek the most recent expected benchmark pricing is in the 7%+ range: anything below that likely will not price.

It is not often that one finds smoking gun reports which refute all claims, such as those by EuroStat and Angela Merkel, in which the offended parties plead ignorance of the fiscal inferno raging around them, kindled by lies, deceit, and blatant mutually-endorsed fraud, and instead, now facing themselves in the spotlight of public fury, put the blame solely on related party participants, such as, in a recent case, Greece and Goldman Sachs. Yet a 2001 report prepared by Gustavo Piga, in collaboration with the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Securities Market Association, not only fits that particular smoking gun description, but the report itself was damning enough of another country, a country which used precisely the same off-market swap arrangement to end up with an interest expense of LIBOR minus 16.77% (in essence the counteparty was paying Italy 16.77% of notional each year as a function of the swap mechanics), in that long ago year of 1995. The country - Italy (for confidentiality reasons referred to in the report as Country M), was at the time panned as the Enron of the European Union due to precisely this kind of off-balance sheet arrangement by the Counsel of Foreign Relations. The counterparty bank: unknown (at least in theory, since the swap was highly confidential, and was referred to as Counterpart N), but considering the critical similarities in the structuring of the swap contract to that used by Greece in 2001, and that ISMA cancelled Piga's press conference discussing his findings out of fear for the academic's life, we can easily venture some guesses as to which banks value their recurring counterparty arrangements more than human life.

I would suggest that the long-term interests of the Eurozone are better served by denying Greece a bailout, even if it means that Greece withdraws from the Eurozone and, in the process, weakens the euro significantly, say, from the recent $1.35 – 1.36 level to
$1.20. A weaker euro would actually be quite popular in export-oriented Germany, and be generally welcomed in the entire Eurozone as enhancing the competitiveness of the region. Also, inflation is currently well below the ECB’s preferred level of around 2% allowing room for any inflationary consequences of a euro depreciation to be manageable. Second, absence of a Greek bailout would lower the
risk of moral hazard inherent in Portugal and / or Spain following in the same path if Greece does receive a bailout. Despite the temporary weakening of the euro that might result from, say, Greece’s departure from the Eurozone, the emphasis on fiscal health
would have a beneficial impact on the medium-term course of Eurozone inflation and of the euro itself. - TCW

Those banana-hugging Germans strike back, and by doing so, throw the rotten apple of the imminent Greek collapse straight into America's back yard: in today's edition of Handelsblatt, German politicians have said that only the International Monetary Fund is the right institution to save Greece from going bankrupt. While the increasingly irrelevant Greek rumor-spreader has been very busy over the past few days, getting Greek newspaper Ta Nea to announce that now Caisse des Depots has entered the KfW bailout syndicate, in an interview with German TV station ARD, Merkel said that not only is this yet more gibberish but that there is no legal basis for any of the rumored actions. So what will happen to Greece? Well, if former ECB Chief economist Otmar Issing has his way, Greece's dirty laundry will end up being washed by American taxpayers, because you see Greece is just as much a member of the IMF as it is of the EU, or so the Germans claim.