First Act of Greek Default Proceedings Drawing to a Close

Global stock markets are up about 10% since the beginning of the year, volatility has collapsed, US economic data continue to defy even the mild slowdown proponents and the ECB seems to have backstopped the European banking system. 

Yes, my dear reader. This is how quickly you move away from the apocalyptic abyss and back to normal. My base case is that we are close to excess complacency in equity markets and a sell off is overdue, but it is exactly also under these circumstances (where smart money start to hedge) that the market may deliver one final run up to get everyone and the postman in before hosing everyone. 

In the short term, one of the only remaining stumbling block in the form of the ongoing default proceedings in Greece seem to be no match for the ongoing positive animal spirit of the equity market. Only a week ago, we got news that talks in Greece had stalled, but most recently we have been reassured that talks are back on track. 

The main niggle on the first occasion appeared to be what kind of interest rate that investors would get on their new bonds and thus, ultimately, the loss of face value currently said to be 50% but also, by some, claimed to be as high 62.5%. Another issue would be whether Greece would pass legislation that forces investors to participate in the debt swap if a majority of investors agree to the PSI terms. This was specifically being discussed in the context of a particular group of investors holding both CDS contracts and the underlying bond and who would maximize their payout on the former by forcing through a hard default. 

None of the terms seems have changed massively in the past week, but time is running out with March the 20th set as the final deadline as this is when Greece would otherwise have to make a payment of 4.5 billion-euro ($18.7 billion) on maturing debt. The general consensus is that if no agreement is reached, this date would mark the hard default. The reason for the optimism is then that we are very close to full surrender in the form of a 90% participation rate of creditors and, we are told, it is only a matter of time before the final 10% agrees. 

The details reported so far are as follows;

Quote Bloomberg (21 Jan 2012)

The parties are near an initial agreement under which old bonds would be swapped for new 30-year securities carrying a coupon that would begin at 3.1 percent, reach 3.9 percent and go as high as 4.75 percent, Athens-based newspaper Proto Thema reported on its website yesterday, without saying where it got the information.

The desired macroeconomic outcome of all this is obviously well advertised. In 2020, Greece is supposed to have a government debt to GDP ratio of 120% and presumingly some form of growth that would allow this level of debt to stay stationary or perhaps even decline over time. 

Let me be clear absolutely clear here. Within any conceivably realistic macroeconomic model, there is no way that Greece can reach a stable debt level with moderate growth under these conditions. Under the interest rate scenario noted above (let us with a average interest rate of 3.8% on the new debt) the nominal interest rate would still be substantially higher than the growth rate of the economy. The only way, the nominal debt level could then be kept stationary is by forcing the fiscal balance into surplus. However, the problem is that this affects the denominator in the debt/GDP calculation by sucking out demand (growth) from an economy already structurally impaired (within a currency union and all that).

The implications are obvious I think . The promises of stability that the PSI currently holds (even if it comes with considerable pledges of IMF money) are bound to disappoint. 

First act of several to come

First of all, let us be clear. Despite, politicians' mortal fright to use the D-word and the media's acceptance of this fact on the basis that CDS contracts are not activated under the PSI, this is a stone wall default [1]. Anyone, who bothered to take merely a scant look at the history of sovereign defaults will see that the current Greek situation fits well within the framework. Indeed, the proposition that this is not a default because CDS contracts are not activated is ludicrous since in the vast majority of sovereign defaults, the debtor country begins negotiations with creditors well before the actual default is forced upon it. The fact that insurance contracts bought to protect a creditor involved in such negotiations have now been rendered useless says more about the nature of the our modern financial system than it does about the definition of a sovereign default. 

Hence, we come to the real nature of this game. 

The deal which now seems to be close to completed by no means closes proceedings. It is very likely in my opinion that private creditors who are currently the only ones being forced to take a haircut due to seniority of the IMF and the ECB will face a near 100% loss on their holdings. The argument is simple. Given the amount of debt held by the ECB and the IMF and the fact that these two institutions are senior debt holders the debt held by private creditors becomes juinor debt and thus the tranche which takes the first (and in my opinion likely complete) loss in the event of a default. 

Of course, once we reach this point the issue of CDS contracts will rear its head yet again since if a 50-60% haircut can be considered voluntary anything beyond this becomes very difficult to characterize as such. Any rating agency would find it difficult not to classify further losses as a default and thus begins the fun in earnest. And then comes the ECB and IMF's share. It will be politically dynamite if the ECB had to print on the liability side to cover losses on the asset side on Greek sovereign debt [2] or if the IMF had to ask its contributors for extra cash to cover for losses on loans made out to Greece or any other economy. Obviously, much will be done to prevent this, but just look at the numbers of Greece's economy and you will see that it is not that outlandish, especially if Greece opts to stay in the euro zone. Finally, Greece only represents the starter here. Any deal agreed  in Greece will be ardently watched in Ireland and Portugal who will feel they are entitled to the same deal with their private creditors. 

Most tragedies have several acts, twists and turns. Investors should expect no less from the one currently being played out in the European sovereign debt markets. 

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[1] - I know that the legal smarty pants will wade in now noting that default is only used when a payment is missed, but fact of the matter is that sovereign debt restructurings and defaults throughout time have always been a long process. Claiming that the Greek situation is different because it is allegedly voluntary and CDS contracts not activated is pathetic in my view, nothing less really. 

[2] - In practice the ECB could do nothing and see its balance sheet shrink with the amount lost on the asset side (i.e. reduce lending to the banking system (delevering) with the amount lost on the bonds). However, in the event of a large loss beyond provisions (if any) it is likely that the ECB would "need" to credit reserves with the amount lost on Greek bonds (hence printing money) it would do this by increasing open market operations (the LTRO essentially) on the asset side. I mention the liability side first though since the mechanism would essentially be deleveraging. Whenever a bank takes heavy losses on loans it usually responds by raising capital AND reducing lending. Since the ECB can't really issue debt in the same way as commercial banks, it would need to either reduce lending OR if that is not possible issue liabilities to match the loss of which it is, as a central bank, free to do at its lesure. 

Banking follies in the eurozone

Edward Hugh has a brilliant analysis of recent events in the eurozone and especially how banks are leveraging the liquidity provided by the ECB to "cleanse" their balance sheet of bad assets and essentially exchanging these for freshly minted euro deposits at the ECB. I think we should be very clear what is going on here; this is essentially a covert recapitalisation of the European banking system and the ECB is in every sense of the word acting as a lender of last resort. 

Here is the relevant part;

Another area where the transfer of liquidity doesn’t show up as a change in aggregate excess liquidity is when banks offload their wholesale liabilities to other EuroArea banks and refund via the ECB. Here again, if they do it smartly, they can even earn a bit of “quasi carry” in the process, by buying back their debt at well below face value from those who are anxious to exit the periphery, and then refinancing at the ECB without writing down the underlying asset. This could be termed a liability “write down”, and again the procedure earns the bank a nice bit of income which can subsequently be used to help the recapitalisation process.

Take the Portuguese Bank BPI (the country’s fourth largest), which is making public tender offers to buy back its debt. If all concerned tender their bonds to BPI, BPI will pay something short of  €1.5bn cash to investors. Mortgages which were previously sitting in one of their SPVs will return to their balance sheet, and ECB money will now be on the other side financing them allowing significant profits (and capital) to be reported. In this particular tender the smallest discount is 35% and the largest is 65%. Investors may initially balk at the offer, since they will nurse a heavy loss (equal, naturally, to BPI´s profit) but ultimately they will probably be only too happy to be able to walk away from Portugal, and  with some cash in their pocket to boot.

Iberian banks were already aware of  the benefits of this kind of restructuring during the 2009-2010 liquidity wave, and went about quietly repurchasing their bonds (bank capital, securitizations, senior bonds) on a selective and private basis at a discount. Much of their reported profits in those years in fact came from either the ECB carry trade or this kind of  transaction.  So when we read that another Portuguese bank – Banco Espirito Santo – has just had €1 billion of debt guaranteed by the Portuguese state (a sovereign which can’t itself go to the markets) it isn’t hard to imagine that the process going on in the background is something similar to that seen in the BPI case, and that the debt is being guaranteed so it can  go over to the ECB to be posted as collateral.

The National Bank of Greece has been doing something similar. They recently offered to buy back some €1.5 billion in covered bonds and preferred securities,offering 70% of face value for the covered bonds and 45% for the preferred hybrids. As the bank itself says, “The purpose of the offers is to generate core Tier 1 capital for the group and to strengthen the quality of its capital base….The offers would generate a gain for the group.”

And Italian banks would seem to be doing something similar, since they issued around €40 billion in government backed bonds specifically to take to the ECB. The bonds are held by the banks themselves and stay on their books to maturity, their only purpose being to provide collateral for use at the ECB. In fact Italian banks took something like €116 billion from the LTRO, or almost 25% of the total. Perhaps this is why Unicredit CEO Federico Ghizzoni and other European top bankers met ECB officials in Frankfurt back in November, to discuss new rules for collateral.

In Spain securitised mortgages sitting on the balance sheets of the bank-ownedFondos de Titulizacion de Activos could also be recycled in this way (here’s a complete list, although note that these Funds are regulated by Spain’s CNMV and not the Bank of Spain, which is why their presence is relatively unknown and people are able to accurately say that the central bank has been very strict on SIVs, since they weren’t their responsibility).

That something like this may be happening, with the ECB “buying into” public and private  Euro Periphery debt  while investors are discretely getting out is suggested by this report in Bloomberg:

The euro is losing the relationship with riskier assets that underpinned the currency in 2011 as the deepening sovereign debt crisis reduces the creditworthiness of even the biggest economies in the region. The 17-nation currency has fallen 8.7 percent against the dollar since October, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has gained 3.4 percent, and the correlation between the two dropped to 58 percent from a record 91 percent in November, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The euro had moved almost in lockstep with investments linked to growth, including stocks and the Australian dollar, since January 2011.

This decoupling is taking place as European Central Bank President Mario Draghi cuts interest rates and promises banks unlimited cash for three years to rein in soaring borrowing costs for governments… Strategists also anticipate more losses as the US economy improves while the euro zone shrinks, driving international investors away from the region’s assets.

So if the first two objectives were to help the struggling sovereigns, and enable the commercial banks to refinance their debt, then to some extent these objectives have been met. But what about the third objective, moving credit on the periphery to get the real economy moving again? Well, here the ECB’s measures are likely to have far less effect, and indeed what effect they do have may be in some way a mixed blessing, since the banks seem far more worried about demonstrating they have an adequate level of core capital than they are about participating in solutions to real economy problems.

While I would, in general, be hesitant in taking anything from Zero Hedge at full face value I think the following story on Unicredit adds flavor to this by providing further evidence on the points Edward mentions above. 

The story is clearly speculative but gets backing from Edward's accout above. The following seems to be a part of the general process which in itself is, in my view, absolutely mad.

Banks in weak countries have been issuing debt, getting a government guarantee, and then posting them as collateral at the ECB. There are examples of this for Greek banks for sure, but my understanding is it has also been occurring in Portugal and Ireland. It is the only way banks in Greece (and the other countries) can raise money.

The article then goes on to make this more alarming point (but really does not have evidence to back it up) that it appears that about €40 billion of the first LTRO was done by Italian banks (Unicredit?) that issued bonds to themselves and got a government guarantee, and then posted this asset as collateral for liquidity through the LTRO.

So, here is how I understand it.

Unicredit issues a 3m bill and gets a government guarantee so that whoever chooses to buy this bill knows that it will be backed by the sovereign (after all, this is still better than the bank even if the two are joined by the hip). The only problem is that it is being issued to itself with a permanent guarantee from the government.

From an accounting perspective this must be close to illegal in any meaningfully lawful jurisdiction, but I defer to experts here of course. The issue here is not then that the sovereign is guaranteeing a liability of a bank, we have seen this plenty of times and it is indeed the only way that some financials can issue debt, but rather that the bond never gets marketed to third party buyers. 

It is absolutely astonishing that this 3m bill is then being posted as collaterall at the ECB. But you must understand that it has to be posted as such as far as I can see since you can't hold your own liabilities.  So, the banks posts a bond issued to itself and posts it at the ECB and get freshly minted fresh euros credited to its bank account at the ECB. After the process, Unicredit still has the bond as a liability but instead of the same bond on the asset side (which is impossible) it has a deposit asset with the ECB.

If this is true, and the ECB is agreeing to this I must admit that it amounts to a serious bout of banking follies in the European banking industry. 

ECB/Fed Support for the European Banking System - 750 billion USD, and counting ...

One point that I have been shouting from the proverbial roof tops in my research, to partners and colleagues is that 2012 may well be the year when all major central banks will be conducting both conventional and unconventional monetary easing at the same time. I think this is a very strong testament not only to the severity of the ongoing debt crisis in the developed world, but also to the propensity of central banks to choose inflation as the  desired route to recovery. We need not initially discuss whether they are deploying the proper set of policies or even whether such policies represent moral hazard or a ponzi scheme on government debt.

The main thing is to realise that this is an unprecedented global monetary experiment. 

My message to investors in 2012 would then be not to underestimate this inflation bias by part of global central banks. Inflating your way out of too much debt won't work in the long run without considerable defaults and/or economic stress (hyper inflation). Events since 2008 are ample evidence of this, but the simultaneous inclination to create inflation and debase your currency (to generate more inflation and exports) by all major central banks will continue to exert a profound effect on asset prices and the global economy. 

In so far as goes the idea that an investors' interest in asset prices is conditioned on return and volatility we can say that central bank policy will affect both. Financial assets will certainly benefit from excess liquidity, but the unravelling of too much debt through inevitable defaults and the central bank policies themselves will generate volatility. Whether the combination of such volatility and return means that you should stay out of the market entirely is a question for the individual investor. 

From a macroeconomic point of view, the downbeat assessment remains however that it is difficult if not impossible to paint a picture of where sufficient growth is going to come from and on the investment side of things, the higher level of volatility will tend to shake the foundation of investors even if money is to be made for short periods of time. 

Most attention has been centered on the ECB, whether the 3y LTRO represent QE and whether the continuing rejection to buy government bonds outright means that the ECB is a laggard among global central banks (see this excellent report by Hinde Capital for additional analysis relative to the points below). 

750 Billion USD,  and counting ... 

Europe remains the center of the global debt crisis, a role the continent has now decisively taken over from the US which stood at the forefront in the initial phases of the crisis in 2008. Apart from the almost endless summits and meetings among government officials the significant measures continue to be the ones coming from the ECB.

In my view, the European interbank market is virtually dead and dusted, and the ECB and the Fed are now effectively the only thing between Europe's banks and large scale failures. Since early September 750 billion USD worth of liquidity has been provided to the European banking system of which 100 billion sits on the Fed balance sheet through USD swap lines.

Who will bet against the final 3y LTRO auction to take this beyond one trillion USD?

Spanish and Italian curves are now nicely steep again after a brush with inversion which obviously was one of the main objectives even if it was always debatable whether banks would buy government bonds with the liquidity taken up at the ECB.

The question is; how do you unwind all this? 750 billion USD to roll short term liabilities with the ECB and the Fed seems to me to be one of the biggest gamble in monetary history. 

While the BOE and the Fed have been transparent in their QE efforts and the BOJ never really having left the zero bound the ECB has been more covert. However, it is my contention that with the expansion of the securities market programme (SMP) in 2011 to buy considerable amounts of government bonds (1) as well as the 3y LTRO the ECB is now fully engaged in quantitative easing.

I base this on two points. 

• The ECB has acted as a sovereign debt buyer of last resort in times of crisis. It is common knowledge in the market that the ECB has been Italian and Spanish bonds in times of particular stress on the notion that these two economies in particular could not be allowed to fatally succumb to the debt snowball dynamics.

• ECB support for the banking system in the form of collateralised liquidity and wholesale funding is not temporary but structural and permanent in nature. The interbank market in Europe is not working and has not been working since the crisis started in 2008.

The ECB will of course vehemently deny this but investors should understand that such denial is mainly out of political reasons.  When Draghi unveiled the ECB’s attempt to backstop the crisis in Europe by offering full allotment liquidity on a 3y basis, the market was disappointed because the central bank president also reiterated that the ECB would not step up its purchases of government bonds.

I think that the ECB will be forced into a much more direct and active role where unsterilized purchases in the primary market (monetisation) will be needed, but I fully appreciate the political issues. We are currently in a delicate situation where new governments in most of the involved countries are saddled with forced mandates to impose austerity. It is very difficult for all parties involved to push this agenda if the ECB had stepped up a full backstop. Moral hazard risks are consequently paramount here.

As such, investors must content with the ECB’s attempt to shore up the European banking system which is no little feat given the bank rollover schedule in 2012  as well as new Basel II regulation which will further impair already shaken balance sheets. The ECB’s initiatives then follows the steady deterioration of conditions in the European (indeed global) banking system which initially culminated in the coordinated action by global central banks to supply dollars through Fed swap lines and which found its European answer in the ECB’s decision to provide unlimited liquidity yet again.

The problems look ominous for European banks and the global financial system in general. No matter what, European financial institutions will have to delever significantly which will spread its tentacles wide and far due to the high penetration by European banks in emerging markets (Eastern Europe in particular). 

Behind the scenes however, significant ink has been spilled to debate and speculate on to the exact significance of the ECB’s liquidity operations.

John Hempton for example suggests that the ECB’s policy move is an open invitation to play the carry trade game using almost free liquidity to buy higher yielding government bonds. 

Well the Euro fix is in. Whether it works - that is another question. But the fix is this: European banks can borrow unlimited amounts for three years to buy Euro government debt. The debt often yields 5 percent. The money costs 1 percent.

I agree that the incentives are certainly there for the banks to play this game especially in the context of government bonds as zero risk weighted assets. The problem is that many European banks have spent more than a year and two stress tests to get rid of substantial amount of peripheral government debt (which do not count as zero risk weighted assets according to Basel III) and as such weak governments are unlikely to benefit from this. 

The flip side of this is that most of the liquidity taken up by banks go straight back to the ECB at the deposit facility which is now standing higher than at any time between 2008 and 2010. 

Quote Reuters

The euro zone banking system starts the new year awash with record levels of liquidity but few signs that institutions are prepared to lend to each other, leaving money markets frozen.Most of the near half trillion euros of three-year funds borrowed from the European Central Bank in the last week of 2011 have made their way back to the ECB's overnight deposit account.

The Reuters piece goes on to argue that most of the liquidity will probably go to aid the large refinancing need banks face in 2012 and thus effectively as a replacement for a non-functioning interbank market that would normally be able to roll this financing. If this does nothing to solve the problem of sovereign insolvency and illiquidity it will work wonders through the fact that banks won't act as a drag on their respective sovereign's balance sheet as long as the ECB is involved. 

I would note though that even though the liquidity is mainly reflected in reserves held at the ECB, it still represents excess liquidity as noted by Danske Bank. 

Some market commentators have argued that the first 36 months long-term refinancing operation (LTRO), in which banks took EUR490bn in total, has so far not worked as planned because the extra liquidity has simply been placed on the deposit facility at the ECB. However, this argument is false.The sharp increase in outstanding open market operations (MRO+LTRO) increases excess liquidity (defined as open market operations plus recourse to the marginal lending facility minus autonomous liquidity factors minus reserve requirements) and this excess liquidity shows up as deposits at the ECB in just the same way as it did in 2008-10. 

However, nothing is easy and despite the fact that collateral can be posted for liquidity the sovereign is still on the hook as my friend Edward Hugh points out. 

Banks are being encouraged to keep rolling over what are basically NPLs by financing them at 1% at the ECB (foreclosing on them in Spain and keeping the property on the books may cost something like 8% in comparison). But the ECB isn't assuming the risk here, the national sovereign implicitly is, and is getting in deeper by the day. 

This is certainly true by the letter of the law but one has to wonder whether the ECB will ever get paid back here. I mean 3 years is an awful lot of time. The ECB can roll these loans as long as need be (it has already effectively been rolling bank funding since 2008) while maintaining the figue leaf that it is not funding sovereigns. This may be true, but it is effectively funding the sovereign's banks and postponing the day of reckoning which is bank failures or nationalisation or both.

If the ECB is then forced take a hit on the collateral or the loans themselves, it will need to create the money to pay for these loans by printing euros. This sounds as a plan to me except that it does not solve the funding risks of governments which may or may not be able to ask their banks for help. The likely answer is that they won't be unless the ECB and EU decide to wield the ultimate weapon of financial oppression which would be to penalise reserves over a given level with negative interest rates at the same time as banks would be forced, through regulation, to hold government bonds. 

But Edward makes another interesting point;

Looking at the Greek PSI, what they would try and do (if all this gets that far, I mean if the Euro holds together long enough in this Byzantine world) ) is load up the private sector share of the haircut, and keep the ECB as untouchable official sector. At the limit they can use ELA to keep the banks afloat while the sovereign restructures and then recapitalises.

(...)

Why would any ex Eurozone third party want to be counterparty to anything which might end up being subordinated to ECB exposure later on down the line. The more I think about it the more it seems to me that the 3 yr LTROs might end up choking the European banking system to death.

It is difficult to disagree on the gist of this point, namely that the ECB is digging itself a very big hole. If banks can exchange under water assets at the ECB for a deposit asset at the ECB (albeit with a negative carry) the ECB is running the risk that it becomes the sole counterparty of bad assets in the euro zone in which case seniority will mean very little. 

The Greek situation is a good example. Private creditors face an almost certain 100% wipeout exactly because they represent such a small tranche of the total stock of debt. In such a situation the asymmetric relationship between subordinate and senior debt holders mean that the latter essentially become equity holders. But once subordinate creditors are wiped out the turn comes to the senior debt tranches and the further the ECB goes along the road of providing full allotment liquidity the higher will be its implicit direct claim on assets of all sorts of qualities.

In conclusion, it is my view that the ECB is now the only thing between the economy and widespread bank failures, but I also concur that the consequence of this is a permanent outsourcing of the interbank market in Europe to the ECB's balance sheet and, quite possibly, Fed's USD swap lines. 

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(1) - Even if such purchases have been fully sterilised.