Sovereigns

So who's big enough to bailout France? How do you spell "No One" in French? This banking thing is about to get uglier than most comprehend!!!

As it dawns upon the world that Ms. Merkel means exactly what she says and is not going to back down you may expect a quite negative reaction in the equity markets and a widening of spreads for some risk assets along with a strengthening of the Dollar. I am talking about the “Trend” here and not some trading strategy for today’s business. Germany is not going to flinch and cannot both due to local politics and to the now obvious fact that Germany has just about reached the limits of what she is financially able to do with a $3.2 trillion economy. To put it quite simply; they have run out of excess cash and more European contributions are only going to weaken the balance sheet of the nation and seriously imperil Germany’s financial condition. I say, one more time, Germany is not going to roll over and all of the pan European schemes brought forward by the bureaucrats and the poorer nations are not going to go anywhere. There is one novel possibility here and that is that the Germans, like the British, may opt out. Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland et al may just say, “Fine, go ahead if you wish to have Eurobonds and the like but we will not guarantee them.” All plans do not need to have an either/or solution and this may well be Germany’s position in the end which would place the periphery nations and France in quite an interesting, if unenviable, place.

It's another one of those hope-fueled days in Europe as European stock indices across evey nation close comfortably in the green as the EU Summit begins. Germany has taken all the substantive things off the table and Cyprus and Portugal threw in the towel but nevertheless, stocks are 1-2.5% higher (with Italy and Spain outperforming). We assume this is reflexive pricing of 'the crisis is now so scary that the ECB will have to do something' but it seems the FX and Sovereign bond market missed that pre-emptive hope-driven view as Portugal yields/spreads spiked, Spain pushed back up to 6.93% and saw further flattening in its yield curve (as short-dated LTRO-enthused bonds underperform dramatically) as 2s10s is almost back to six-month pre-LTRO levels. Italian spreads pulled off their worst levels to close mixed but remains over 40bps wider on the week. EURUSD closed down over 35 pips at 1.2450 and stocks were in a world of their own also relative to credit markets today.

In light of the zombification that now exists in Japan and also America (and coming soon to every single QE and bailout-heavy Western economy) — zombie companies, poorly managed, making all the same mistakes as before, rudderless, and yet still in business thanks to government intervention  — it is clear that the liquidationists grasped something that Keynesians are still missing. Markets are largely no longer trading fundamentals; they are just trading state intervention and money printing. Why debate earnings when instead you can debate the prospects of QE3? Why invest in profitable companies and ventures when instead you can pay yourself a fat bonus cheque out of monetary stimulus? Why exercise caution and consideration when you can just gamble and get a bailout?  Unfortunately, Mellon and his counterparts at the 30s Fed were the wrong kind of liquidationists — they could not heed their own advice and leave the market be. Ironically, the 30s Fed in raising interest rates and failing to act as lender-of-last resort drove the market into a deeper depression than was necessary (and certainly a deeper one than happened in 1907) and crushed any incipient recovery.

Liquidation is not merely some abstract policy directive, or government function. It is an organic function of the market.

With any and every European leader talking unilaterally (and only one worth listening to, given the market's reactions), we ask and answer what should investors expect from the forthcoming EU Summit and what are the investment implications? Morgan Stanley's Arnaud Mares offers a succinct analysis of the three key axes being debated around the 'banking union' premise: a European Deposit Guarantee Scheme (DGS); a Common rule book and European level bank supervisor; and a federal resolution regime (and, in some proposals, a federal recapitalisation vehicle). The base-case view is that the current set of EU banking union proposals, whilst directionally helpful, are too long-term or too timid to address the 'crisis' with supervision stratified and insufficiently federal leading investment implications of little meaningful relief in  Eurozone banking and sovereign credit markets. Recent comments from European ministers suggest that the path to federalized Banking Union will be far from an easy one, given the tightly interconnected federal debate.

Between macro-economic 'religious' experiences, regulatory uncertainty, and legislative gyrations, the world appears to be a very different place now than before 2008. It seems that from the 'Lehman' moment (some might call it an 'epiphany' moment), and later the US downgrade, markets realized that the impossible was possible and while every long-only manager will try to convince you that nothing has changed, these four charts (via Barclays) will go a long way to proving that everything has changed. Whether it is policy uncertainty, the frequency of 'fat-tailed' events, market illiquidity, or the domination of correlated 'macro' risk over idiosyncratic diversification; trading (or investing) has profoundly changed since 2008.

Equity, credit, and sovereigns all ugly. Merkel's unequivocal comment on her nation's unwillingness to 'share' burdens and slap the proverbial cheek of Monsieur Hollande, Italy's banking union looking for more 'aid', Spain actually asking for their bailout, Greece 'avoiding' reality, and Cyprus pulling the 'China rescue plan' last ditch retort to market angst; but apart from that, things are dismal in Europe. Italy down over 4% and Spain almost as bad on the day as every major equity index is well into the red. Italian banks monkey-hammered down 6/7.5% and halted a number of times. Investment grade credit outperformed (though was notably wider) as financials (subs and seniors), XOver, and stocks are plummeted to 11-day lows. After breaking below the pre-Spanish bailout levels on Friday, Spain and Italy 10Y are now 20-40bps wider with Italy and Spain 5Y CDS notably wider and well over 500bps. Notably the short-end of the Italian and Spanish curves underperformed significantly (curves flattened): 2Y BTPs +57bps vs 10Y +21bps; 2Y SPG +37bps vs 10Y +17bps. Europe's VIX snapped back above 27% (and we note that our EU-US Vol compression trade is moving well in our favor). EURUSD has been smacked lower by over 80pips ending under 1.25 once again.

Spain has finally made the “formal” request for aid (and Italy right behind them it seems this morning). There is another summit. Expectations for anything positive seem incredibly low. There seems to be a scramble to shoot down anything that is said out of Europe. It really doesn’t matter what is said, the negatives and potential negatives, and imagined negatives get the traction. Of all the things people want Europe to do, buying bonds on the secondary market seems the least effective (which ECB's Novotny has now written off) Any program that has a chance of working has to help both the sovereigns and the banks. If an action only helps the sovereign or the bank it is less likely to succeed. If it helps neither, than it is a total waste of limited capital. So don’t waste the money on secondary market purchases. The money barely helps the sovereign and does nothing for the banks. It may help some speculators who will buy ahead of the activity, but will be quick to get short again when the time comes.

Goldman got those positions in last week, just like BoomBustBloggers did, and now its time to tell the muppets to help drive the prices down??? Paranoid conspiracy theory or just plain fact?

Here we come:

• MOODY'S CUTS 4 FIRMS BY 1 NOTCH
• MOODY'S CUTS 10 FIRMS' RATINGS BY 2 NOTCHES
• MOODY'S CUTS 1 FIRM BY 3 NOTCHES
• MORGAN STANLEY L-T SR DEBT CUT TO Baa1 FROM A2 BY MOODY'S
• MOODY'S CUTS MORGAN STANLEY 2 LEVELS, HAD SEEN UP TO 3
• MORGAN STANLEY OUTLOOK NEGATIVE BY MOODY'S
• MORGAN STANLEY S-T RATING CUT TO P-2 FROM P-1 BY MOODY'S
• BANK OF AMERICA L-T SR DEBT CUT TO Baa2 BY MOODY'S;OUTLOOK NEG

So the reason for the delay were last minute negotiations, most certainly involving extensive monetary explanations, by Morgan Stanley's Gorman (potentially with Moody's investor Warren Buffett on the call) to get only a two notch downgrade. And Wall Street wins again.

While Citi's Willem Buiter believes that the new coalition in Greece removes the very short-term risk of GRexit, as he notes in an Op-Ed in the FT today that "minimum demands for relaxation of fiscal austerity by the new government will not exceed the maximum fiscal austerity concessions Germany is willing to make", he does think the TROIKA "unlikely to tolerate another failure to comply on all fronts by the December assessment" leading to an end-2012 Armageddon a la the Maya. The "willful non-compliance" with the conditionality of the TROIKA program also brings doubt on the willingness of core eurozone nations to "take on significant exposures to Spain and Italy unless it can be established unambiguously that a willfully and persistently non-compliant program beneficiary will be denied further funding". His succinct summation of the "onion-like unpeeling and unraveling" of the Euro's endgame is perfectly described as: "The greatest fear of the core nations is not the collapse of the euro area but the creation of an open-ended, uncapped transfer union without a surrender of national sovereignty to the supra-national European level" as he sees material risk of "procrastination and policy paralysis".

Two days ago we noted with muted disgust that Europe has legislated to scrap the use of rating agencies, who were everyone's best friend during the up-phase in the global ponzi, but now that deleveraging is accelerating and ratings downgrades are coming, are like the drunk guest who refuses to leave the insolvent party at 4 am. Sure enough, the time has come to enact rules to kick them out. But wait, there is much more. Moments ago Reuters reported that the European Central Bank is discussing a medium-term plan (as in indefinite) to scrap rating rules on euro zone sovereign bonds and instead set their value when used as collateral in lending operations on its own internal assessment, central bank sources said. You read that right: the ECB itself will decide what the collateral value is of pieces of paper it accepts, in exchange for other pieces of paper with the faces of famous dead people on one side (even if technically the whole operation takes place electronically). And to think that for some odd reason allowing drug addicts to write their own prescriptions is illegal. Apparently all is fair in love and breaking all rules of sinking monetary systems.

They're all Blowtards....

What the MSM is missing is that Spain's failings make this real. Spain is big enough to bring down the whole shebang, right now, and its banks cannot be salvaged with just a hundred billion or so.

We have long been concerned at the implicit and explicit subordination of both financial and sovereign bondholders in Europe by the actions of their overlords political elite in pursuit of short-term liquidity fixes to insolvency issues. As talk of the ESM coming to life in the short-term and a 'Redemption Pact' in the intermediate term - which as Goldman describes involves mutualizing a portion of each country's debt (resulting in a partial upgrade of the existing pool of Eurozone sovereign bonds) in a European Redemption Fund (ERF) and, in the process, extending debt maturities (kicking that can) onto the public sector's balance sheet. As with all these mutualization schemes, the ERF ineluctably raises the twin problems of  'moral hazard' and 'subordination', which need to be mitigated. Goldman discusses these two sides of the same coin as it notes subordination is explicit when the ESM intervenes (and also with the ECB's SMP) but a little less obvious in the ERF (though still as painful) which is, we note, perhaps more appealing to keep the masses unaware.