Archive - Dec 7, 2011 - Story

Many EU leaders seem to actually believe that the Treaty changes are important.  The reality is the market could care less about treaty changes.  The market cares about only one thing, that the ECB will announce new, bigger, more aggressive sovereign purchases.  That’s all the market cares about.  The market believes that the treaty changes provide an excuse for the ECB and IMF to ramp up their efforts.  The EU can do all the treaty changes it wants, but if it is not followed up with aggressive new printing policies, the markets will sell-off.

As the attached chart showing USD liquidity swap line usage by the ECB, or more specifically by European banks, we have now seen a surge to levels last seen in August 2009. However, more importantly this is where the usage was for the first time after the failure of Bear Stearns, and when everyone thought all had been fixed... until Lehman came. We are there now, in other words, we have just experienced a behind the scenes Bear-type event. What is disturbing is just how fast the rate of change was this time around compared to before, when it took months to get to $50 billion. Now, it was one week. When "Lehman v2.0" hits and it will hit, the next step function in the Fed's global bailout will be so big and so fast, it will induce vertigo.

• According to the FT, last-minute negotiations have commenced to create a much bigger financial "bazooka" to present at this week's EU summit that could include running ESM and EFSF together as well as winning increased support for the IMF. However, the report was later denied by a senior German government official
• According to a senior German government official, he is more pessimistic than last week on overall summit deal. He also said that he can't foresee running EFSF and ESM simultaneously, and he is not sure if the summit will reach conclusion on using IMF funds in the Eurozone crisis
• ECB funding to Italian banks rose to EUR 153.2bln at the end of November from EUR 111.3bln at the end of October
• Bund futures received a boost following a strong Bobl auction from Germany
• ECB allotted USD 50.685bln in its 3-month USD operation vs. Exp. USD 10bln
• CHF moved lower after the SNB slashed its 7-day USD repo rate, and weakened further after a Swiss minister said that Switzerland is still looking at negative rate options

• Euro zone leaders may raise ESM, EFSF capacity limit (Reuters) - since denied by Germany
• EU talks on doubling financial firewall (FT)  - since denied by Germany
• Martin Wolf: Merkozy failed to save the Eurozone (FT)
• Ireland to seek cheaper bail-out (FT)
• Fast-track ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up (FT)
• Clarke rejects call for EU power grab (FT)
• Obama Sets Campaign Theme as ‘Make-or-Break Moment’ for the U.S. Economy (Bloomberg)
• Spain Weighing a Fast, Costly Cleanup of Banks (WSJ)

As expected, virtually everyone, or a total of 39 banks (compared to 2 the week prior), scrambled to receive dollars from the ECB following the cut in the USD swap line rate from OIS + 100 to OIS + 50. Specifically, $50.7 billion in 84 day swaps (34 banks asking for dollars at a new and reduced rate of 0.59%) and $1.6 billion in 7 day swaps (5 banks at 0.58%) was just opened for a total of $52.3 billion. The expectation had been that just about $10 billion would be demanded, indicating how close to the cliff Europe's banks had been. This compares to just over $2 billion in the week before, and demonstrates the severity in the funding market that threatened to topple European banks like dominos last week until precisely a week ago the global central bank cartel announced an emergency dollar funding band aid. Reuters confirms: "Banks took more than $50 billion from the European Central Bank on Wednesday in its first offering since slashing the cost of borrowing dollars, a sign that some euro zone banks have problems finding dollar funding as the region's debt crisis intensifies." Elsewhere dollar libor continued to rise, passing 0.54% for the first time in years. This will continue rising as the self-reported dollar funding cost closes down to the OIS+50 differential, or where European banks can borrow from the Fed. And now that the dollar funding squeeze has been confirmed, all eyes turn to the ECB's LTRO announcement tomorrow. "What really matters is what the ECB does tomorrow afternoon, and in that especially what they do with the long-term refinancing operations (LTROs) and on the collateral rules," Societe General economist Michala Marcussen said. "What would be extremely helpful right now is if we get longer maturity LTROs." The ECB is expected to announce ultra-long 2-year or even 3-year refinancing operations after its meeting on Thursday." Needless to say, all these are stopgap liquidity measure to fix what is increasingly a pan European (in)solvency crisis, and thus will achieve nothing in the long run. And what is worse is that the non-USD liquidity indicators have once again hit an inflection point and turned negative: 3-mo Euribor/OIS spread rose to 1.002 vs 0.999 yesterday, near last wk’s high of 1.006 which was most stressed since March 2009. In other words, as we have been saying, the funding squeeze has now managed to shift away from USDs and is impacting the EUR market itself, something the Fed has no control over.

Following late November's disastrous 10 year Bund auction, in which the goal seekers saw everything from a failure of the repo market to the Bundesbank trying to fail the auction on purpose, yet which was nothing more than a simple case of little demand and high supply, today, following a steady leak wider in yields in the entire bund curve, Germany sold €4.09 billion in 1.25% 5 year bonds, with the maximum amount of €5 billion selling easily following bids for a total of €8.67 billion. The Buba retained €0.91 billion, which it always does, and is not an indication of some ulterior motive to have the ECB bailout Europe. As expected the Bid To Cover was a soaring 2.1x compared to 1.5x on the last 5 year auction on November 2. In other words, a stunning success and demonstrating what happens when you actually have demand for paper following a decline in prices. Below are the Wall Street responses to this strong auction. So that takes care of that. What is more important, and why futures are down is that as expected, yesterday's deux ex FT was promptly denied by Germany after a "senior German official" spoke to Reuters and said they are "not sure if summit will reach conclusion on using IMF funds in eurozone crisis" and "can't forsee running EFSF and ESM simultaneously". They have also said they are "more pessimistic than last week on overall summit deal". In other words, look for many moresuccessful Bund auctions as things resume their downward trajectory all over again.