Archive - Dec 20, 2011 - Story

Fitch admits, via Bloomberg headlines, what we already knew:

*FITCH: EFSF DEBT 'AAA' RATING DEPENDS ON FRANCE REMAINING 'AAA'

*FITCH SAYS RISK OF EFSF DOWNGRADE HAS INCREASED

It is no surprise that the ECB has been less than overwhelming in its optimism, unlike Messers Barroso, Van Rompuy et al. when discussing the current and future state of the union that is Europe. While not pessimistic per se, the focus on zee stabilitee and lack of bazooka (no we don't see the 3Y LTROs as a magic bullet) is perhaps related to their view of the difficulties faced in addressing the needs of an increasingly disparate gaggle of countries. In their December Financial Stability Review, the ECB points to four key risks: (contagion, funding, macroeconomy, and trade imbalances), they fear "euro area financial stability increased considerably in the second half of 2011, as the sovereign risk crisis and its interplay with the banking sector worsened in an environment of weakening macroeconomic growth prospects". Summarizing into seven charts, the ECB provides a quick-and-dirty perspective on what is increasingly becoming obvious as capital flows and funding needs interplay with one another (for worse rather than better).

The financial crisis of the last few years has created not just a perceived shift in the creditworthiness of our financial entities but a real crack in the foundation of their business model and more importantly any explicit or implicit supports or guarantees. Moody's, in a special report on credit post crisis "The Great Credit Shift" look at the impact of the crisis on every major asset class within the credit space from sovereigns to corporates to structured finance. Noting that this crisis has profoundly changed the credit picture for sovereigns and financials, Moody's note there is some dispersion in the latter as banks have seen systematic downgrades while insurers (for now) remain on par with pre-crisis levels. More interestingly, large US regional banks represent an exception to this broad downgrade but we suspect that the continued low interest rate, low NIM, and high volatility spread environment will cause both insurers (we have long considered proxies for HY portfolios, no matter how well cushioned from vol their business models may be) and US regionals (consolidation will have the opposite effect of TBTF in our view as it will lead to more comfort with more risk-taking and expose them to more current-bank-like volatility) to face more pressure going forward (despite their lower apparent sovereign risk exposure). As BofA and Morgan Stanley trade at extreme 'crisis' levels in both CDS and equity markets, we suspect the raters have further to go and while the systemic shifts are apparent, we would expect less and not more differentiation going forward - especially if we sink into another solvency crisis.