Sovereign Debt

Well, my hat is off to the global central planners for averting the next stage of the unfolding financial crisis for as long as they have. I guess there’s some solace in having had a nice break between the events of 2008/09 and today, which afforded us all the opportunity to attend to our various preparations and enjoy our lives.

Alas, all good things come to an end, and a crisis rooted in ‘too much debt’ with a nice undercurrent of ‘persistently high and rising energy costs’ was never going to be solved by providing cheap liquidity to the largest and most reckless financial institutions. And it has not.

If indications become reality then we are faced with a leftist government in Greece that will either renegotiate a new bailout agreement with Europe or it will head back to the Drachma or be forced there by the refusal of European Union to provide any additional funds. In Spain we are faced with bare bones arithmetic where the country cannot bailout its Regional debt and its back debt because they do not have the capital to do either; much less both. Both countries can flop about for a brief period of time but the conclusions are unavoidable we are afraid and so a very unpleasant landscape awaits us in the coming days. We have warned about all of this for quite some time and we have hammered upon it in recent days as equities, credit/risk assets, the Euro have all declined in value as I had predicted. There may well be a bounce or two along the way but we continue to maintain that dark days lie ahead based not only upon fundamentals but based upon a union in Europe that has been deceptive in presentation and deceitful in practice.

No really, WTF!?

We suspect, when we look back on Europe some months from now, that we will see; a love affair gone badly due to conditions beyond anyone’s control and a separation that, while bound in great sadness, is what the Fates have determined for the actors in this grand drama. Extending the unreality, foillowing news that Greece will - as expected - hold new elections, today the new French President and the German Chancellor will meet for the first time. They will issue a statement promising cooperation, a brighter Europe, some vision of a grand alliance and an eternal pledge for the spirit of unity between the French and the German people. Believe none of it. The Germans are already targeting Vichy as the new place of government in France and there is an active search underway to find the decedents of Marshal Petain. There was an armistice between Germany and France in 1940 and there may be a new one announced today but the new one, like the old one, will be a short lived affair as the goals of France and the goals of Germany could not be further apart.

Update: the expected next step: "GREEK 2023 BOND PRICE FALLS TO 14.51 PERCENT OF FACE VALUE" - but it was a "no brainer" trade... a "trade of the year" trade... Tough break for Greylock. As we said "Um, distressed bond expert guys - the bonds you should have bought are the old UK-law bonds which may return par...at least you had some covenant cover." Oh well - at least it is "other people's money."

Back on January 22, (Subordination 101), we advised readers that the one virtually sure way to make a killing in the bond market is to i) buy up a fulcrum Greek piece of debt, i.e., international/UK-law bond with strong covenant protection ahead of the country's restructuring, ii) refuse participation in the cramming down PSI, which was nothing but a GM-type exercise in covenant stripping, and iii) sit back and enjoy the money trickle in. Back than the €450 million bond of May 15, 2012 traded at ~75. Today, that same bond is about to generate a 31.26% cash on cash return, or 135% annualized, as it is Greece that has blinked, and according to the FT, has decided to make a full bond payment on this issue to avoid an out of control sovereign default, even though by doing so, it reduces its cash holdings by a third to just over €1 billion as discussed yesterday, and risks pushing both the PSI participants and its citizens into a murderous rage, as instead of complying with its mouthing off during and after the PSI, that not one bondholder would get a par repayment (nor apparently use the cash for public proceeds such as paying salaries), the one entity who ended up having all the leverage was those bondholders, who went against the grain, and held to their covenant rights. Just as we suggested. End result...

I am asked, from time-to-time, why I write about Europe with such frequency. The answer is quite simple; there is nothing more important, nothing that will have a greater impact upon the world’s financial system, nothing that will impact any and all markets more than what is transpiring on the Continent. It is a grand experiment gone bad, a Federalist’s dream floundering in the dust, a vision of Heaven that is being dragged through the narrow gates of Hades and there is no longer any painless way home if home is to be found at all. The notion that there is some sort of decoupling in the marketplace between America and Europe is an adage quoted by the village idiots for the fools listening in the town’s square; nothing more than that.

Big Ben starved the banks trying to save them, hence they got more aggressive in hunting for food (yield)! That being the case, don't believe only JPM was overreaching for yield.

Now that the Greek exit is back to being topic #1 of discussion, just as it was back in the fall of 2011, and the media has been flooded by groundless speculation posited by journalists who have never used excel in their lives and are merely paid mouthpieces of bigger bank interests (long live access journalism and the book sales it facilitates), it is time to rewind to a step by step analysis of precisely what will happen in the moment before Greece announces the EMU exit, how the transition from pre to post occurs, and the aftermath of what said transition would entail, courtesy of one of the smarter minds out there, Citi's Willem Buiter, who pontificated precisely on this topic last year, and whose thoughts he has graciously provided for all to read on his own website. Of course, take all of this with a huge grain of salt - these are observations by the chief economist of a bank which will likely be swept aside the second the EMU starts the post-Grexit rumble.

As suspected, yesterday's report that the Troika may be caving on Greece appears more and more as a red-herring trial balloon, leaked by the Greek press without substantiation, and which sought to lighten the tension ahead of a trading week which is already looking rather askew. Because not even a full 24 hours later, Germany fires right back with an article in the Spiegel which not only anticipates the Grexit, but what happens the day after: namely that Greece would receive further aid from the EFSF if it exited the euro. It also notes that the EFSF aid to service bonds would continue. Greece would continue to get aid as EU member as every other member state. While it is unclear if this article is in response to the WiWo piece we noted yesterday which tried to quantify the costs of a Greek impact, and which has now ominously been picked up by Die Welt, in which Germany was finally starting to get worried about the hundreds of billions in sunk costs should Greece exit, the punchline here, needless to say, is not only the contemplation of a Greek exit but that Greece would be "all taken care of" even as the newly reintroduced Drachma lost a few hundred percent in value every day as Greece stormed its way back to FX competitiveness. Spiegel's punchline: "This is to the consequences of a possible €-egress will be mitigated." Hopefully the market agrees.

Merkel is putting on lipstick for her dinner with Hollande....

All you need to read and some more.

Highly respected economist and strategist David Rosenberg has told that Financial Times in a video interview (see below) that gold “will go to $3,000 per ounce before this cycle is over.” Markets are repeating the downturns of 2010 and 2011 and it is time to search for safety, David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff tells James Mackintosh, the FT Investment Editor. Rosenberg sees a “very good opportunity in gold” as it has corrected and seems to be “off the radar screen right now”. He sees gold as a currency and says the best way to value gold is in terms of money supply and “currency in circulation.” As the “volume of dollars is going up as we get more quantitative easing” he sees gold at $3,000 per ounce. Mackintosh says that Rosenberg’s view is a “pretty bearish view”. To which Rosenberg responds that it is “bullish view on gold and gold mining stocks.” Mackintosh says that it is “bearish on everything else”. Rosenberg  says that it is not about being “bullish or bearish,” it is about “stating how you view the world” and he warns that the major central banks are all going to print more money and keep real interest rates negative “as far as the eye can see.”

The Immortal Bard must have been referencing Madrid when penning these lines or, if not, would likely approve of their application this morning. The nationalization of Bankia, the third largest bank in Spain, is not some isolated event that is singular and alone in nature regardless of the expected dampening and muted words and phrases issued by the Spanish government. The cancer has been identified but not isolated and you may be assured that it remains in the lymph nodes of the two major banks in Spain. Fortunately, during America’s financial crisis, many of the sub-prime mortgages were securitized and no longer resided on the balance sheets of the American banks. In the case of Spain we find not only the majority of the mortgages resident at the Spanish banks but we find an added dimension which is a huge amount of money lent to Real Estate developers which is impaired and still on the books of the Spanish banks. Further, in my opinion, none of these loans have been accurately accounted for and they are being carried at whimsical valuations by the banks or pledged as collateral at the ECB where the Spanish bank funding jumped 50% in one month and now stands at $294 billion. Following the bouncing ball; there is now so much encumbrance of assets between pledged collateral and covered bond sales that the actual worth of the two major Spanish banks is now someplace between “not much” and “De minimis” should the situation deteriorate to the point of impairment.

By mainstream media accounts, the presidential election in France and parliamentary elections in Greece on May 6 were overwhelming verdicts against “austerity” measures being implemented in Europe. There is only one problem. It is a lie. First off, austerity was never really tried. Not really. In France for example, according to Eurostat, annual expenditures have actually increased from €1.095 trillion to €1.118 trillion in 2011. In fact spending has increased every single year for the past decade. The debt there increased too from €1.932 trillion €1.987 trillion last year, just as it did every year before. Real “austere”. The French spent more, and they borrowed more. The deficit in France did decrease by about €34 billion in 2011, but that was largely because of a €56.6 billion surge in tax revenues. Again, there were no spending cuts. Zero. Yet incoming socialist president François Hollande claimed after his victory over Nicolas Sarkozy that he would bring an end to this mythical austerity: “We will bring back Europe on a track for jobs, growth and the future… We’re no longer doomed to austerity.” This is just a willful, purposeful distortion. What the heck is he talking about? Certainly not France.

All is (once again) failing. What to do? Much more of the same of course. Only this time whip out the nuclear option: the Helicopter Money Drop. This is the logical next step that Citigroup's Willen Buiter sees as "Central Banks should also engage in 'helicopter money drops' to stimulate effective demand" - temporary tax cuts, increases in transfer payments, or boosts to exhaustive public spending - all financed directly by the willing central bank accomplice in the monetization gambit. In his words: "This will always be effective if it is implemented on a sufficient scale." It is not difficult to implement, would likely be politically popular (nom, nom, nom, more iPads), and in his mind need not become inflationary. He does come down to earth a little though from this likely-endgame scenario noting that "helicopter money is not [however] a solution to fiscal unsustainability." It is just a means of providing a temporary fiscal stimulus without adding to the stock of interest-bearing, redeemable public debt. Any attempt to permanently finance even rather small (permanent) general government deficits (as a share of GDP) by creating additional base money would soon – once inflation expectations adjust to this extreme fiscal dominance regime - give rise to unacceptably high rates of inflation and even hyperinflation. His estimate of the size of this one-off helicopter drop - beyond which these inflation fears may appear - is around 2% of GDP - hardly the stuff of Keynes-/Koo-ian wet dreams. The fact that this is being discussed as a possibility (and was likely always the end-game) by a somewhat mainstream economist should be shocking as perhaps this surreality is nearer than many would like to imagine.