Franco – German plans for a rump euro beginning

I have been saying for some time that the euro zone is coming apart at the seams. This makes a lot of sense. The question is how to do it. Here’s my suggestion from a few days ago

Merkel: ‘The ECB has a clear mandate, stability of the currency’

This is a translation from a Handelsblatt interview with Amgela Merkel. MUST

Franco – German Divergence

The European debt crisis is straining the Paris-Berlin axis, the pillar of EMU. French banks are heavily exposed to Italian debt, with some estimates putting public and private sector exposure at more than $400 bln at the end of H1 (without taking into account insurance, hedges, etc). The French government is not in nearly as good a fiscal position as Germany. The French 10-year premium over Germany stands at a record 145 bp today. It finished last year near 40 bp

Ignore Egan-Jones at Your Peril

If you are still inclined to give Greece the benefit of the doubt, I suggest you study the works of Egan-Jones, a credit rating company located in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Contrary to most other rating companies, Egan-Jones does not receive any compensation from bond issuers (a huge conflict of interest in the world of credit rating agencies) and, unlike most of its competitors who haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory in recent years, Egan-Jones has a formidable track record (see it here).

Sean Egan, co-head of Egan-Jones, predicts the eventual haircut on Greece to be close to 90%. He has done his homework and believes that Greece can support no more than €40 billion of debt through tax revenues. That amounts to only 10-15% of outstanding Greek sovereign debt. Sean put his case forward brilliantly in an interview in Barron’s earlier this year

Germany must do it, not China

So how do we explain the European crisis? One theory is that the European crisis was caused by the moral turpitude and spendthrift habits of lazy Europeans along the periphery, in sharp contrast to the hard-working and thrifty countries of the center. According to this theory it is unfair to demand that Germans clean up the mess.

If you believe this theory, you are going to have to explain what happened in 2000 that turned thrifty Italians, French and Irish into spendthrifts, and that turned ordinary Greeks, Portuguese and Spaniards into even worse spendthrifts. You will also have to explain why spendthrift Germans in the 1990s suddenly morphed into the stolid, thrifty creatures of legend.

An alternative theory is that the imbalances were caused by internal policies – perhaps the creation of the euro and the gearing of monetary policy to German needs at the expense of the periphery? – which led to the severe internal imbalances. These imbalances created employment growth in the countries that suppressed consumption, and forced the countries that didn’t to choose between debt and unemployment. Of course since the latter countries had no control over monetary policy, the choice was largely made for them by the ECB with its excessively low interest rates, and their debt levels surged.

I find this alternative theory a lot easier to understand, and if it is true it places responsibility for saving the euro squarely in Germany’s hands. The only way to save the euro (and incidentally to prevent Germany’s banks from being forced to absorb huge losses on peripheral European debt) is for Germany to spur consumption and investment enough to reverse the current account surplus. Only this will allow peripheral Europe to grow and to earn the euros needed to repay the debt

Throw the Greeks out of the eurozone

That’s what Philipp Rösler, the leader of the junior partner in Germany’s coalition government, is saying. Barry Eichengreen says that this kind of talk is counterproductive

The euro zone is one giant vendor financing scheme

Here’s an interpretation of the euro zone I have been meaning to run by you and I touched on it in the update to my post on how austerity in Europe works. In a fixed exchange rate environment like the euro area, you don’t have currency fluctuation issues. So persistent current account imbalances as we see within the euro zone are really a form of vendor financing

The German labour market miracle

Jobs and the lack of them are top of the agenda for policymakers and increasingly groups of protestors gathered in the financial districts of New York, London, and elsewhere. Unemployment in these countries is in danger of reaching 10%. In Germany, however, unemployment is below 7%. Some hail it as a miracle. This column finds a scientific – and far less inspiring – explanation

Europe’s Non-Solution

Let’s not get bogged down in numbers. The EFSF could have 440 billion euros behind, 1 trillion, 2 trillion, even 10 trillion euros, but it all comes back to the funding sources. The French are right: it makes no sense to implement this program without the backstop of the ECB, which is the only entity that could make any guarantees credible, by virtue of its ability to create unlimited quantities of euros.

Both the leading policy makers within the euro zone and market participants continue to conflate two distinct, but related issues: that of national solvency and insufficient aggregate demand. Policy makers want the ECB to do both, but in fact, the ECB is only required to deal with the solvency issue. When you do that in a credible way, then you get the capital markets re-opened and you give countries a better chance to fund themselves again via the capital markets. It means you do not actually need several trillion dollars, because you have a credible backstop in place

The euro zone is coming apart at the seams now, redux

This is an update of a post I wrote at the beginning of September about European political dysfunction

Three Political Events that Should be on Your Radar

Tomorrow’s EU Summit is the markets main focus. The key issue is whether European officials can finally provide closure to the two year old debt crisis and deliver the “comprehensive” and “decisive” package they have repeatedly promised. We are skeptical as governance structures and diverse interests of the stakeholders lend itself to incrementalism.

Outside of the EU Summit there are three political issues that do not seem to be appreciated by many participants. These events can have dramatic implications for the economic and financial outlook

Full Text: Berlusconi’s blistering attack on Merkel and plea for lender of last resort

Italy argues that the ECB has made the crisis worse because it refuses to stand at the ready as a lender of last resort like other central banks, an argument I have also made. However, the Italians suggest that the EU is facing a liquidity crisis. Berlusconi then launches a personal attack, presumably against Angela Merkel, writing that “no one is the self-appointed commissioner” of the euro zone. Wow