Unification

The lack of a centralized constitutional and monetary union has led to several years of inaction in the process of unification of the Euro-zone.  While it was a "grand experiement" to run the Euro-zone under a single currency the underlying structure to make it effective long term was never achieved. There are currently many promises that have been made to the financial system by the ECB.  The question is whether or not they can ultimately "cash the check." While we do not have certain answers as to the where, the who or the when - we are fairly confident that it will be sooner than many currently imagine. We do believe that the ECB will be able to skirt by the ratification of the ESM this coming week and get some limited funding into place, however, we still believe the bigger problem comes at the end of summer when the German voters begin to voice their concerns - after all it is their money that is being wasted.

The Belgian Central Bank said yesterday that about 25 tons of the European nation’s gold reserves have been lent to bullion banks according to Bloomberg. Nearly 10% or about 25 metric tons of the National Bank of Belgium’s remaining 227.5 tons of gold reserves are currently lent to bullion banks, Director and Treasurer Jean Hilgers told the central bank’s annual meeting in Brussels. The proportion of gold reserves on loan declined from 84.3 tons on December 31, 2011, and averaged 48.1 tons in 2012 as loans matured and some gold loans were reimbursed early. Hilgers said that the Belgian central bank sees gold lending decreasing further this year. During the 1990’s, Belgium sold some 1,000 tons of gold into the market - more than three quarters of its remaining holdings. The Belgian gold reserves, which had already seen sizeable liquidation in late 1978, fell from 33.7 million ounces on 12/31/88, to just 5.7 million ounces on 03/31/98, or a fall of 83% in less than 10 year.

In some surprising news, and quite contrary to what its record low bond yields would indicate (for a key reason for said artificial demand for French, see The Greater Fool) today the Pew Research center released results from a poll of 7646 EU citizens in March 2013, showing that the new sick man of Europe is Europe itself, or rather the great unification project itself: the European Union. Perhaps most surprisingly, nowehere is this more evident than in France itself - the country where the idea of a European Union germinated in the first place - and where the decline in support for the EU has been the greatest in the past year, with just 22% responding affirmatively to the question whether 'economic integration strenghtened the economy', down from 36% a year ago, and the biggest drop of all surveyed EU member states.

The debate rages... Soros: "The euro crisis has already transformed the European Union from a voluntary association of equal states into a creditor-debtor relationship from which there is no easy escape. The creditors stand to lose large sums should a member state exit the monetary union, yet debtors are subjected to policies that deepen their depression, aggravate their debt burden, and perpetuate their subordinate position. As a result, the crisis is now threatening to destroy the EU itself. That would be a tragedy of historic proportions, which only German leadership can prevent." Sinn: "Soros is playing with fire... Many investors echo Soros. They want to cut and run – to unload their toxic paper onto intergovernmental rescuers, who should pay for it with the proceeds of Eurobond sales, and put their money in safer havens... Soros does not recognize the real nature of the eurozone’s problems. The ongoing financial crisis is merely a symptom of the monetary union’s underlying malady: its southern members’ loss of competitiveness... His accusation that Germany is imposing austerity is unfair. Austerity is imposed by the markets, not by those countries providing the funds to mitigate the crisis."

Europe's dual problems of low growth and weak profit margins combined with this week's vote in Italy are likely to usher in another period of European underperformance, but as JPMorgan's Michael Cembalest notes, that is the least of it as Italy overtook Japan with the worst real GDP growth of all advanced economies since 1991. In fact, other than wartime, the last few years in Italy have been the worst for growth since Italian unification in 1861. But, before the rest of Europe gloats that 'they are not Italy, or Greece', he reminds us that the slowness of French GDP growth in recent years is the slowest in over 80 years. As he warns, all things considered, from an investment standpoint, caution continues to be warranted as problems appear to be taking their toll on EU profitability.

"The European Union is a horrible, stupid project. The idea that unification would create an economy that could compete with China and be more like the United States is pure garbage. What ruined China, throughout history, is the top-down state. What made Europe great was the diversity: political and economic. Having the same currency, the euro, was a terrible idea. It encouraged everyone to borrow to the hilt. The most stable country in the history of mankind, and probably the most boring, by the way, is Switzerland. It’s not even a city-state environment; it’s a municipal state. Most decisions are made at the local level, which allows for distributed errors that don’t adversely affect the wider system. Meanwhile, people want a united Europe, more alignment, and look at the problems. The solution is right in the middle of Europe — Switzerland. It’s not united! It doesn’t have a Brussels! It doesn’t need one."

99 years ago the Fed was born. Then there was a world war. Two decades later, Keynesian economics (in a somewhat mutated form than that envisioned by the author, much like the Taylor rule) became the gold standard (pardon the pun) of the status quo, as it gave the political establishment a "scientific" justification to spend and accumulate gargantuan debt loads without fear of backlash by the public. Then there was another world war. Then the gold standard was obliterated, allowing the same establishment to dilute the instrument used as money and to cross the "gargantuan" barrier in spending and debt issuance. Then the world came to the verge of complete socio-economic and systemic collapse after a ponzi pyramid of $1 quadrillion in credit money nearly imploded in on itself. Then the final chapter of the corporate takeover of the sovereign model established by the Treaty of Westphalia arrived, as private deleveraging at the terminal expense of public debt took place at a record pace. This is a nutshell is the world history of the past century. And to summarize where we currently stand, we present the chart below. In the entire "developed" world, there is only one country that runs a budget surplus, even as the entire "developed" world is now, according to the Reinhart and Rogoff definition of sustainable public leverage, insolvent.

When jawboning is stuck on max, and mere talking and exortations to just "believe" lead to no incremental benefit for PIIGS bonds and the leve of the Dax, what is a central planner to do? Why start, er, fingerboning, and write extended missive on the future of one doomed utopian vision or another. Sure enough, the former Goldmanite has just released the following Op-ed in German Zeit, titled, "The future of the euro: stability through change", which contains this piece of sheer brilliance: "The ECB is not a political institution. But it is committed to its responsibilities as an institution of the European Union." The European Union which is first and foremost a... political institution.

Earlier today we showed for the nth time that with insanity and insolvency ravaging the old continent, at least one person has the temerity to avoid sticking his head in the sand of collectivist stupidity and denial. That person is Bundesbank head Jens Weidmann, who until now may or may not have had the backing of Germany's elected leader, Angela Merkel. Moments ago it became clear whose side Merkel, who recently came back from vacation and is set to spoil the party that the (insolvent) mice put together in her absence, is on. From Reuters, who quotes Merkel in her just released interview with German ARD: "I think it is good that Jens Weidmann warns the politicians again and again," Merkel said. "I support Jens Weidmann, and believe it is a good thing that he, as the head of the German Bundesbank, has much influence in the ECB."

"Prolonged economic weakness will persist - especially in the peripheral countries - with further periods of intense financial market stress" is how Citi's Willem Buiter's economics team sees the future in Europe. While they continue to believe that the probability of a Greece exit from the Euro is around 90% in the next 12-18 months; but more critically it is increasingly likely in the next six months - conceivably as soon as September/October depending on the TROIKA  report. There is a crucial series of meetings and events in coming weeks and while they believe that the ECB's conditional bond-buying (and ESM/EFSF) may help avoid a 'Lehman moment' around the GRExit, they believe that there will still be considerably capital flight out of periphery assets should it occur. The reason being simply that even if funding costs were reduced, the current mix of fiscal austerity and supply-side reform will not return any periphery country to a sustainable fiscal path in coming years.

Another week of central bank watching ahead, and markets will play their customary game of chicken with the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.  Both central banks have policy meetings this week – the Fed’s concludes on Wednesday, the ECB’s on Thursday – and capital markets have been moving higher in recent days on the hope of coordinated action.  For investors and traders, this sets up a classic “Buy the rumor, sell the news” pattern for the week ahead - as the overarching theme is that human history repeats because human nature does not change.  But Nic Colas of ConvergEx asks the deeper question, and the one that will retard any lasting move to the upside, is how much central banks can do without help from fiscal policymakers.

With just a few days left until the pre-opening soccer games begin in the UK, we continue our five part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) on the intersection between markets and the Olympics by considering whether an integrated Europe would have performed relatively better - i.e. would 2+2>4 - and what are the factors. Goldman's analysis of the pros and cons of 'integrating' their Olympic teams is extremely apropos the current deteriorating (yet desperately dreaming of improving) coordination of these 17 disparate nations. The answer, of course, is that there are some benefits from this medal 'integration' in specific cases but since German reunification, their medal performance has deteriorated - even in the team events where aggregating talent pools should have its greatest gains. In a 'zero-sum' context such as competing for Olympic medals, Germany's gains must come at the expense of other countries - and rather notably there are few French medal winners before or after an 'integration. Sounds familiar?

False solutions in sight

Ten months ago, as the latest Grand Plan was being announced, we wrote in detail on just how angry Zee German people might get once they realized what was going on. With the weight of the world increasingly burdened on their shoulders, Michael Cembalest of JPMorgan asks "will Germany spend its accumulated national wealth to save the Eurozone (at least temporarily), and how much might it cost them?" Notably, for the better part of a century, the tendency for conflicts in Europe to coincide with Germany's relative economic might is astonishing, but between backstopping the Periphery, a non-inflationary ECB solution, and five years of support to finance the departure of foreign capital - avoiding social collapse in Greece for example - Cembalest estimates the cost to be around 1 trillion Euros. What is more astounding is that he then goes on to compare this cost to re-unification (over the past 20 years) and notes that even if Germany had to pick up half the trillion-euro tab, its debt-to-GDP ratio would rise above 100% (well over the 90% 'This Time It's Different' tipping point). Just how much does this mean to Germany and Europe? IMF Managing Director Lagarde gave a speech last week in which she highlighted the historical importance of Europe and how the concept of the Euro dates back to Charlemagne in the 800s. True, perhaps; but that has not prevented other European monetary unions from failing in the interim. You can ignore economics, but it will not ignore you.

If the now failed monetary union is the soul that Europe sold to the devil countless of times in the past decade just to plunder from the future as greedily as possible, consequences of unsustainable leverage be damned, the heart of Europe was the visa-free and customs unions that allowed the continent to be as one for the vast majority of people. Yet while the end of the monetary union will not be permitted as long as there are banks which stand to go out of business should that transpire, the end of visa-free travel will hardly impact banks much if at all. Which, unfortunately, explains why while the soul of Europe, already rehypothecated countless times to the lowest bidder, is still out there somewhere, the heart has just begun what may be terminal arrhythmia which has only one sad conclusion.