Sovereign Debt

Although not quite there yet, it will soon be time to go shopping...

As if the 'risk-less' dollar-swaps the Fed has extended to any and every major central bank were not enough, William Dudley just unashamedly admitted that the Fed now holds 'a very small amount of European Sovereign Debt'. Explaining this position, as Bloomberg notes:

• *DUDLEY: FED HOLDS OVERSEAS SOVEREIGN DEBT TO MANAGE RESERVES
• *DUDLEY: HIGH BAR FOR ADDITIONAL PURCHASES OF EUROPE DEBT

Dudley, testifying to a House panel, noted that he doesn't see more efforts by the Fed to buffer the US from Europe's tempests and believes European banks are deleveraging in an orderly manner. So not only is the US taxpayer bailing out Europe via the IMF (as we noted here a week ago using Greece as an intermediary) and the Fed is providing limitless USD swap lines but now we join the ECB in monetizing European government bonds - something we warned might happen back in December 2010. As for being a small amount - wasn't MF Global's holding relatively small too? And aren't we getting a little full from all this 'buying'?

"The statistical component of the European Union, Eurostat, is quite clear; they do not count guarantees or contingent liabilities as part of any nation’s debt. We might all note that if Nestle or IBM or General Electric did this they would find their senior executives jailed for Fraud but never mind; this is the methodology of the EU which quite obviously masks the truth. The problem then is not the simple math used to obtain a more accurate debt to GDP ratio but in digging out the various guarantees, contingent liabilities and obligations of any member nation of the European Union. “Time consuming” would be the accurate words because you have to sleuth around like Sherlock Holmes to come up with the data. Yes, it is all there somewhere or another but it is nowhere all together and so must be found." And as Mark Grant points out what we noted last July, when one factors in all the various guarantees and contingent liabilites by Germany to date, something peculiar appears: instead of a 81.8% Debt/GDP, the country's actual Debt to GDP soars to a Italy-lie 139.8%.

All you need to read and some more.

In an interview with Louis James, the inimitable Doug Casey throws cold water on those celebrating the economic recovery. "Get out your mower; it's time to cut down some green shoots again, and debunk a bit of the so-called recovery."

Somehow the investing public managed to convince itself that a massive liquidity flood designed to 'help' banks (implicitly buy sovereign debt) with their government reacharounds actually 'fixed' the European economic imbalance problem because yields fell and reflexively this means all-is-well. Just ask Eastman Kodak shareholders how good it felt to rally over 100% the week before bankruptcy? Morgan Stanley has the mother-of-all-chartdecks on the European situation but 3 charts standout in our view by summarising the problems Europe faces. The last few days have seen Eurosis return - but away from the momentum and liquidity - did it ever really go away? This time is no different except LTRO 3 is becoming harder and harder as quality unencumbered collateralizable assets are few and far between - and with the recent weakness in Spain, how long before ECB margin calls start to ramp up?

There are relatively few natural buyers of Spanish long dated bonds here. Fast money is likely caught long, and it will take a potentially reluctant ECB and some already overly exposed Spanish institutions to step up and stop the slide. It may happen, but many of the policies that “bailed out” Greece created very bad precedents for bondholders, and some of those are coming home to roost, as is the understanding that LTRO ensures that banks can access liquidity, but does nothing to fix any problem at the sovereign level.

Bernanke and Draghi in a snit? Fed and ECB at odds? US-German regulatory run-around? Has Draghi just enaged in an act of ill-advised hubris or does he have a secret plan to stimualte Europe?   

Whether it was the truthiness of Willem Buiter's comments this morning, the sad reality of Spanish housing, or more likely the ugly fact that LTRO3 is not coming (as money-good assets evaporate), today was broadly the worst day of the year for European sovereigns. Spanish 10Y spreads jumped their most since the first day of the year, Italian yields broke back above 5% (and spreads broke back over 300bps), and Belgium, France and Austria all leaked notably wider. Since Friday's close, Italian and Spanish bonds have suffered their largest 2-day losses in over 3 months. Notably the CDS markets rolled their contracts into Monday and perhaps this derisking is real money exiting as they unwound their hedges - or more simply profit-taking on front-run LTRO carry trades but notably the LTRO Stigma has exploded in the last few days back to near its highs. European equity markets are now underperforming credit - having ridden the high-beta wave far above credit markets in the last few months (a picture we have seen in the US in Q2 2011 and HY is signaling risk-aversion rising in the US currently in the same way). Just how will the world react to another risk flare in Europe now that supposedly everything is solved?

What is more amusing than the pathological liars that are Tim Geithner or Ben Bernanke testifying to congress? Both of them testifying at the same time. Such as now. From C-Span: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke go before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Wednesday to discuss lessons learned from Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. In a hearing titled, “Europe’s Sovereign Debt Crisis: Causes, Consequences for the United States and Lessons Learned,” both financial chiefs will share their personal experiences.  Since the crisis, the Federal Reserve has assisted foreign counterparts by provide monetary support. In November, the Fed and it's worldwide counterparts announced a cut in the interest rate premium charged to over seas banks which borrow in dollars.  The monetary policy targeted struggling European banks. In a Senate hearing earlier this year, leading economists also testified on the European debt crisis and the outlook for the eurozone. They said that the U.S. should treat the crisis as a wake-up call and urged lawmakers to bring down debt and spending to sustainable levels.

The next country that could follow Greece out of Valhalla and down to meet Poseidon at Hades gates is Portugal. They trod the path once before but look likely to be headed out on a second journey. The country’s private and household debt are approximately 300% of the total GDP of Portugal and their economy is contracting; around 4.00% by some estimates. While the European Commission estimates a debt to GDP ratio of 111% for this year; the actual data tells another story. Further aggravating a future restructuring are the CDS contracts with a net position of $5.2 billion and a gross amount of $67.30 billion which is about twice the amount of the net exposure for Greece.

The Fed is not a “dealer” giving “hits” of monetary morphine to an “addict”… the Fed has permitted cancerous beliefs to spread throughout the financial system. And the end result is going to be the same as that of a patient who ignores cancer and simply acts as though everything is fine. That patient is now past the point of no return. There can be no return to health. Instead the system will eventually collapse and then be replaced by a new one.

Now in the curious world we live in today; this only came out in public as the answer to a question raised in the German Parliament. Some reflection on the nature of these guarantees, that the European Union had decided not to tell us about, causes me to think of them as “Ponzi Bonds.” These are the seeds of a great scheme that has been foisted upon us. Bonds of a feather that have flocked together and arrived with the black swans one quiet Wednesday afternoon. The quoted and much ballyhooed sovereign debt numbers are now known to be no longer accurate and hence the lack of credibility of the debt to GDP data for the European nations. Stated more simply; none of the data that we are given about sovereign debt in the European Union is the truth, none of it. According to Eurostat, as an example, the consolidated Spanish debt raises their debt to GDP by 12.3% as Eurostat also states, and I quote, that guaranteed debt in Europe “DO NOT FORM PART OF GOVERNMENT DEBT, BUT ARE A CONTINGENT LIABILITY.” In other words; not counted and so, my friends, none of the data pushed out by Europe about their sovereign debt or their GDP ratios has one whit of truth resident in the data.

Want to keep the minotaur perpetually lost? Forget the labyrinth: just let him loose in the epic disaster that is the Greek post-PSI balance sheet. Because anyone who still harbors quaint notions of pari passu sovereign debt is about to get an epileptic fit. As the BNP chart below shows, following the "successful" completion of the PSI, where we expect quite a few billion in UK-law holdouts to present a substantial headache to Greece as noted yesterday, the country will have not one, not two, not even three distinct debt classes of debt, but a whopping seven! Yup - one country, seven tranches of debt, in order of seniority: 1) EU-IMF Loans; 2) EFSF Loans; 3) SMP GGBs; 4) New GGBs; 5) T-Bills; 6) Old GGBs and 7) Other loans. So when that dealer sells you sovereign bonds from now on, we suggest getting some color on tranching, subordination, ranking, priority, security, guarantee, collateral, and in general everything else that is now forever gone in a post-pari passu world. And this is certainly not just Greece. With all of Europe undergoing the same stealthy "unsecured" debt-to-taxpayer higher lien restructuring, the same will happen in Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and eventually every other country, as the only real source of cash to keep the European once dream now nightmare alive are taxpayers, who directly have to fund out of pocket any hope of a residual welfare state... which incidentally at a hundred trillion or more in unfunded liabilities, is far more insolvent than Greece ever could be.

A snoozer of an overnight trading session for now, with Asia rising modestly, Europe green and the now priced in futures levitation as US traders walk in. Nothing material to report, except the usual - the European leverage reality continues to deteriorate: as has been long discussed the taxpayer cost to rescue Greece keeps rising, and the latest and revised figure of the bailout is €172.6 billion, €43 billion than previously thought by some (as we have pointed out from the beginning the true cost of the bailout will hit €210 billion). We will shortly point out the total disaster that the Greek balance sheet is with 7 classes of debt outstanding post the OSI. More disturbing is the "austerity" report out of Spain, where we just learned that total public debt has hit €735 billion at the end of 2011, with regions debt at €140.1 billion, which means that public debt rose to 68.5% of GDP, from 61.2% a year prior.  As Peter Tchir says: "We are still in no one cares mode, but the exposure the core has to the periphery is growing by the day.  Germany's exposure is growing because of Target 2, and Spain and Italy are busy guaranteeing the debt of their banks. On the surface, all is calm. Below the surface it is messier than ever.  They are doing everything possible to keep that mess covered because if it rises to the surface, it will be harder to control than ever before." As a reminder, this is precisely what happened in early 2011... and early 2010. You can only keep trillions of underwater debt under the rug for so long.