Credit Writedowns

The data flow out of Europe today is pretty bad. German factories orders missed and unemployment rose to record levels in France and Greece. Meanwhile the IMF admitted that Greece’s delayed debt restructuring “provided a window for private creditors to reduce exposures and shift debt into official hands.” Does any of this change my bullish bias on Europe’s economy? No, I believe Europe will exit recession at some point in the second half of 2013.

Michael Pettis had a very good post out yesterday that focused on the sectoral balances within and across eurozone countries which I recommend. His point is that excess German savings driven by wage suppression was behind macro imbalances and not thrift. I want to expand upon this theme. My prediction here is that rebalancing away from excess German savings will not occur on nearly a large of scale to matter.

Earlier today I wrote a post on the free blog site about blaming Germany for the problems in the euro zone. I ended up defending the German political response and blaming the euro. Let me just add a bit of colour to that here.

Last year, we saw a sea change in official German policy regarding the euro crisis and inflation. The German government came out in favour of accepting higher inflation domestically in Germany as a sacrifice for eurozone wage and price adjustments to help alleviate crisis. The question is whether this matters. I believe it does, but only in part.

These are the words of European Commission President José Manuel Barroso in a recent interview with Die Welt, a German newspaper. Rather than translate this article in full, I want to put it in context given Barroso’s outburst about austerity hitting its social and political limit in response to journalist Matina Stevis. As I indicated at the time, Barroso was not denouncing austerity, as was assumed in the media. Barroso was calling for backloaded austerity instead of the front-loaded variety. And the Die Welt interview makes this clear.

I have been trying to break up the links posts because I have so many. So I have been writing brief theme posts to go with the links as I used to do when I had more time. I want to make this one short here and I have two topics to highlight. The first topic is Italy and its [...]

The first left-right coalition in Italy since 1946 has survived its first confidence motion in both chambers. As difficult as it may have been to break the political logjam, the hard work lies ahead for Prime Minister Letta.

Italy’s new Prime Minister Enrico Letta is touted as a man who could change the politics of the EU. The Daily Telegraph in the UK even headlines his initial policy speech as “Italian PM Enrico Letta urges move from austerity to growth”. But is that really the case? I don’t think it is the case. And I will point to language in his speech for why as I develop a few background issues on Italy.

A recent FT article points out that the electoral campaign positioning has already started. And it has the Social Democrats in bed with the Green Party to an unusual degree. The way the Greens and the SPD are talking makes me believe it would be difficult to form a Grand Coalition between Angela Merkel’s Christian Union parties (CDU/CSU) and the SPD, if it were to come to this. On EU policy, this matters.

Osborne has said in the past that his austerity approach is the right one and has pointed to a 2010 paper on government debt and growth by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff as evidence his approach is the right one. Given the recent furore over errors in the data used in that influential Reinhart-Rogoff paper, the British data and Osborne’s conclusions based on that data take on more significance internationally.

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.