Credit Writedowns

Yesterday, Ben Bernanke said that the Fed would start to wind down it’s QE program sometime this summer as I indicated early last week I believed the timetable would be. Market pundits believe these remarks triggered a sell-off in global equities, with Japan being hardest hit as the Nikkei fell 7.3% this morning. I was more concerned about the poor Chinese PMI print. But if the pundits are right, it is an extraordinary move into risk-off thinking given that the Fed had telegraphed its intentions. This incident shows you how the Fed’s exit path is fraught with risk. Japan is another story altogether.

Editors note: Moody’s released the following press release yesterday in conjunction with a ratings action it took on Turkish sovereign debt. Moody’s Investors Service has today upgraded Turkey’s government bond ratings by one notch to Baa3 from Ba1, and has assigned a stable outlook. The key drivers for today’s rating action are: 1. Recent and expected future improvements in key [...]

I have been posting for a while now that I think Greece provides the greatest upside potential. Greece’s sovereign bonds outperforming was one of my ten surprises for 2013 three months ago. And with bond yields now falling below 10%, Morgan Stanley is getting onboard so I am not the only one recommending this trade. I would also posit here that Greek equities have been well beaten down and trade at low multiples based on low earnings, meaning that if recovery does take hold in Greece as I expect it to, then you will get a double benefit from earnings growth and multiple expansion.

Portugal is going to market with a 10-year sovereign bond issue, its first since 2011. I think this is a pretty big deal. Think of it as a complete return to public market access for the Portuguese government, one of the critical pre-conditions for an OMT-style bailout. This is a Herculean achievement by the Portuguese that I did not believe the Portuguese could pull off just three months ago. Ironically, I would credit the deposit tax in Cyprus for this turn of fortune. I will explain why below.

This is an important day for Portugal. It is selling 10-year bonds for the first time in more than two years. Demand is reportedly strong. Today’s 10-year sale follows the 5-year bond sale in January and heralds to full return of Portugal to the capital markets. Portugal’s success in returning to the capital markets is a success for European officials more broadly.

I see that Paul Krugman has shifted his rhetoric in a recent post on British government economic policy. Let me explain how in this post so that I can make a point as to how bond market vigilantes actually work.

It seems that the markets are discounting many of the risks that have plagued Ireland’s economy in recent years. Ireland’s stock market has significantly outpaced the S&P500 in the last few months – ISEQ is up 20% over the past year.

Spain’s 10-year bond yield has fallen 108 bp this year. Just above 4%, the yield is the lowest Q4 2010. The 2-year yield has fallen 93 bp this year. The yield is slipping through 1.70%, for the first time Q2 2010. Recent data suggested that Spanish banks have been the featured buyers of Spanish bonds. The Spanish government released data at the end of last week that we have poured over. These figures paint a strikingly different picture. Spanish banks have indeed bought Spanish debt, but non-residents bought even more in Q1.

Italy is getting closer to putting together a grand coalition government. This has always seemed to us the most likely scenario, but the route to it has been circuitously torturous. Three considerations have led to President Napolitano granting the prerogative of forming a government to the deputy leader of the center-left, Letta.

The overarching theme here is that the economy of Europe is in tatters and this is causing a re-think of the policy course. In my view, the political space for the re-think is limited and will ultimately entail some tacked on growth policies and relaxed deficit target timetables. The prevailing economic paradigm will remain the same, fiscal consolidation to prevent sovereign default. As fiscal consolidation is a deflationary policy, I expect European growth to be weak. On the bank and sovereign debt front, some leeway is available but crisis is never far away. However, fiscal consolidation is negative for periphery corporate bonds in particular as I will detail below.

I was on the Daily Ticker with Lauren Lyster talking about Japan yesterday. My view is that there is no material negative change in Japan’s sovereign debt outlook nor will there be in the medium term because of Abenomics. The video is at the bottom of this post. Before you watch it let me say a little bit about why I take this view on Japan and speak more generally about government debt and deficits. Mike Konczal wrote a post that is getting a lot of buzz on high deficits and Reinhart and Rogoff that will be a good jumping off point for discussion.

This is a good interview with Kyle Bass because it cuts to the heart of the matter. If you are a partisan in the Bass debate on Japan, you can see him as being either correct or incorrect. Now, I have covered this before and I have stressed that he is looking to make an asymmetric bet on outlier events to hedge his market-long portfolio. He is not taking a flyer via outsized risk exposure to short JGB trades. And Bass does make this clear in his commentary. Nonetheless, his macro view of the way interest-rate targeting central banks operate in a fiat currency system is completely wrong.