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The New World Ordoliberalism Part 6: The QE Taper Caper and the Portuguese Squeeze

With 2017 set to be a year of crit­i­cal elec­tions for euro­zone — includ­ing fed­er­al elec­tions in Ger­many, the Nether­lands, and France with the poten­tial to reshape the euro­zone — and since these elec­tions are prob­a­bly going to be heav­i­ly shaped by the ongo­ing exis­ten­tial freak out the euro­zone’s wealth­i­er nations’ role in the euro­zone in rela­tion to the seem­ing­ly end­less euro­zone cri­sis, 2017 is prob­a­bly going to be an espe­cial­ly good year to point out that prob­lems with the euro­zone’s exist­ing struc­ture don’t include a prob­lem with a euro­zone dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly harm­ing those wealth­i­er mem­bers. The prob­lem is quite the oppo­site: the euro­zone is designed to help those wealth­i­er mem­bers at the expense of its poor­er fel­low mem­bers.

And it’s set up to do this in a myr­i­ad of dif­fer­ent ways, most obvi­ous­ly the sys­tem­at­ic deval­u­a­tion of the cur­ren­cies of stronger economies cou­pled with the sys­tem­at­ic increase in the cur­ren­cies of weak­er euro­zone mem­bers. But, as we’ve seen with so many times of the “bailout” in the past, the “bailouts” them­selves are also one of the many way the euro­zone is designed, or evolved on the fly, to ben­e­fit the strong over the weak, often under the spir­it of “no one mem­ber can ben­e­fit more than the oth­ers”. The euro­zone is a strange con­struct if you haven’t noticed.

And in this par­tic­u­lar chap­ter of our explo­ration of what’s wrong with the euro­zone we’re going to take a look at the evolv­ing nature of the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank’s (ECB’s) quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing (QE) pro­gram. Specif­i­cal­ly, how the QE pro­gram was fac­ing a set of obsta­cles that was going to require some tweak­ing to the pro­gram and how the solu­tion to the obsta­cle was to basi­cal­ly choose the tweaks that harmed the weak, in par­tic­u­lar Por­tu­gal. In favor of Ger­many, of course. Keep in mind that Por­tu­gal recent­ly formed a left-wing anti-aus­ter­i­ty gov­ern­ment and has done rel­a­tive­ly eco­nom­i­cal­ly well since com­ing into pow­er . Also keep in mind that Por­tu­gal is one of the few euro­zone nations not fac­ing a ris­ing far-right “pop­ulist” move­ment as a response to its harsh aus­ter­i­ty pro­gram. So you might say the tim­ing is “right” for some pref­er­en­tial treat­ment of Por­tu­gal. Pref­er­en­tial­ly bad treat­ment.

First, let’s take a look at the sit­u­a­tion back in August, before these tweaks were put in place: The ECB was fac­ing a QE conun­drum. The QE rules state that the ECB can only buy euro­zone gov­ern­ment bonds under the fol­low­ing cri­te­ria (self-imposed cri­te­ria that the ECB cre­at­ed for itself ear­li­er):
1. The total bond pur­chas­es for a giv­en coun­try can’t exceed 33 per­cent of its sov­er­eign total bond mar­ket.

2. The bonds pur­chased can­not bear inter­est less than ‑0.4 per­cent.

3. Due to fears of QE becom­ing a back­door bailout for the cri­sis-rid­den coun­tries, all bond pur­chas­es must fol­low a “cap­i­tal key” that caps the max­i­mum bonds that can be pur­chased in a giv­en Euro­pean coun­try accord­ing to the size of that coun­try’s finan­cial sys­tem. In oth­er words, all coun­tries par­tic­i­pat­ing in the ECB’s QE pro­gram (all euro­zone coun­tries plus some oth­ers like the UK), would get equal stim­u­lus, rel­a­tive to the size of their economies and regard­less of the need, or lack there­of, for the QE pro­gram.

Those were the rules. And by August, almost half the euro­zone sov­er­eign bond mar­ket was held by the ECB (no one said clean­ing up a his­toric finan­cial cri­sis would be quick or casu­al) and a sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem was emerg­ing: Ger­many was run­ning out of bonds that were yield­ing above ‑0.4 per­cent. So if the QE pro­gram was going to con­tin­ue with­out break­ing the rules one or more of those three rules was going to have to be mod­i­fied:

The Finan­cial Times
Fast FT

ECB set to run out of bonds to buy – Cred­it Agri­cole

August 16, 2016

by: Mehreen Khan

Liq­uid­i­ty, liq­uid­i­ty every­where and not a bond to drink.

In a world of record neg­a­tive yield­ing sov­er­eign bonds and ever-increas­ing dos­es of quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing, the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank’s bond-buy­ing blitz could soon hit the buffers.

The cen­tral bank’s €80bn-a-month debt spree will have hoovered up half the entire uni­verse of eli­gi­ble gov­ern­ment debt by the end of the year, accord­ing to analy­sis from Cred­it Agri­cole, writes Mehreen Khan.

With the ECB scram­bling around for paper, more than two-thirds of the sov­er­eign bond mar­ket that qual­i­fies for QE will be on the ECB’s bal­ance sheet by next Sep­tem­ber they pre­dict, leav­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers scratch­ing their heads over how to extend stim­u­lus mea­sures.

And the scarci­ty prob­lem is pri­mar­i­ly Ger­man. Accord­ing to its own QE cri­te­ria, the ECB is now exclud­ed from buy­ing Bunds with a matu­ri­ty under sev­en years, as they have fall­en below the ‑0.4 per cent yield floor set by the cen­tral bank. That’s around 40 per cent of the entire Ger­man bond mar­ket, or €413bn accord­ing to fig­ures com­piled by Tradeweb.

Ger­many mat­ters. It is the largest econ­o­my in the euro­zone and thus makes up the sin­gle biggest pro­por­tion of the cap­i­tal key set out by the ECB for its total pur­chas­es.

“If the ECB can­not pur­chase Ger­man bonds, then it will have to change the modal­i­ties of its pur­chas­es”, says Louis Har­reau at Cred­it Agri­cole.

“Germany’s share in the ECB’s cap­i­tal is too big to be com­pen­sat­ed by sub­sti­tute pur­chas­es” he notes.

Ana­lysts wide­ly expect the cen­tral bank to tweak the terms of its stim­u­lus pro­gramme to broad­en the uni­verse of eli­gi­ble debt and ease the bond-sup­ply bot­tle­neck.

This can be done in three ways: by cut­ting the ECB’s deposit rate below ‑0.4 per cent; increas­ing the ceil­ing on its “issuer lim­it” from 33 per cent; and by shift­ing around with a “cap­i­tal key”, where pur­chas­es cor­re­spond to a mem­ber states’ pro­por­tion of over­all euro­zone GDP.

Mario Draghi, ECB pres­i­dent, has promised “flex­i­bil­i­ty” to ensure the cen­tral bank con­tin­ues to hits its month­ly pur­chase tar­get. But as ever in the euro­zone, pol­i­tics is set to throw sand in the wheels of any swift changes to the stim­u­lus pro­gramme, which was first launched in March 2015.

Jens Wei­d­mann, the uber-hawk­ish pres­i­dent of the Bun­des­bank and ECB board mem­ber, has cau­tioned against ramp­ing up pur­chas­es from the indebt­ed coun­tries of the south as it would threat­en the ECB’s cher­ished inde­pen­dence.

If “we focus more par­tic­u­lar­ly on high­ly indebt­ed coun­tries, we blur the bound­aries between mon­e­tary pol­i­cy and fis­cal pol­i­cy which con­tin­ues”, Mr Wei­d­mann said ear­li­er this month.

But remov­ing polit­i­cal bar­ri­ers to action would not prove a panacea if the ECB wants to keep the mon­e­tary taps on past a notion­al Sep­tem­ber 2017 end date, notes Mr Har­reau.

He cal­cu­lates that remov­ing the deposit rate “will not be enough to alle­vi­ate the scarci­ty con­cerns” around Ger­man, Finnish, Dutch and Span­ish bonds should QE con­tin­ue after Sep­tem­ber 2017.

...

So what’s the best way to keep buy­ing time?

The most effec­tive option is also the bold­est: drop­ping the cap­i­tal key – where larg­er economies make up the biggest pro­por­tion of the month­ly pur­chas­es. This would like­ly skew QE towards small­er economies, allow the ECB to con­tin­ue snap­ping up bonds from Por­tu­gal and Ire­land (for­mer bailout coun­tries), and “remove down­ward pres­sure on core yields”, adds Mr Louis.

But it’s also the option that will be most polit­i­cal­ly unpalat­able for the larg­er north­ern cred­i­tor states of the euro­zone.

All in all, the best solu­tion to the ECB’s woes is one that would make the very neces­si­ty of QE pret­ty redun­dant – a grow­ing econ­o­my, ris­ing bond yields, and a nat­ur­al increase in the uni­verse of eli­gi­ble debt.

Chick­en and egg.

“The most effec­tive option is also the bold­est: drop­ping the cap­i­tal key – where larg­er economies make up the biggest pro­por­tion of the month­ly pur­chas­es. This would like­ly skew QE towards small­er economies, allow the ECB to con­tin­ue snap­ping up bonds from Por­tu­gal and Ire­land (for­mer bailout coun­tries), and “remove down­ward pres­sure on core yields”, adds Mr Louis.”

So back in August, it was clear some­thing had to be done to allow the ECB’s QE pro­gram to pro­ceed with­out run­ning out of bonds. And it was also pret­ty clear to observers that the most effec­tive way to tweak the rules would be to drop the “cap­i­tal key” rule so the ECB can focus its bond pur­chas­es on the coun­tries that need it most while avoid­ing the pur­chas­es of bonds in coun­tries like Ger­many where bonds are already in neg­a­tive ter­ri­to­ry. This was seen as the option that would be the most help­ful for the euro­zone as a whole, much more so than the oth­er options like low­er­ing the min­i­mum “deposit rate” yield on the ECB’s pur­chased bonds below ‑0.40 per­cent which would sim­ply allow the ECB to find more eli­gi­ble Ger­man bonds (since so many of them are already yield­ing below ‑0.40 per­cent) to keep the QE pro­gram going.

Por­tu­gal (and Ire­land) Approach the Lim­it and Pre­emp­tive­ly Devi­ate From the Cap­i­tal Key in Response

But also note that Ger­many was­n’t the only coun­try run­ning out of space to oper­ate in the QE pro­gram, some­thing that was obvi­ous ear­li­er in the year. As ear­ly as April, Por­tu­gal and Ire­land were fac­ing a dif­fer­ent kind of prob­lem and drop­ping the “cap­i­tal key” was­n’t going to fix it. At least not alone. That’s because Ire­land and Por­tu­gal were already on track to exceed the ECB’s 33 per­cent cap on the total vol­ume of bonds held for a giv­en nation before the QE pro­gram was set to expire in March of 2017 due to the fact that the ECB still has bonds from Por­tu­gal and Ire­land left­over from its 2010–2012 “Secu­ri­ties Mar­kets Pro­gramme” (the first of the euro­zone cri­sis emer­gency respons­es). And as a result, the ECB’s QE bond pur­chas­es were already devi­at­ing from the “cap­i­tal key” for Por­tu­gal and Ire­land. And not in a help­ful way:

Reuters

Wary of hit­ting lim­its, ECB holds back on Por­tuguese, Irish bond buys — sources

By Bal­azs Koranyi and John Ged­die | FRANKFURT/LONDON
Tue May 17, 2016 | 9:20am BST

The ECB lim­it­ed its sov­er­eign debt buys of Por­tuguese and Irish bonds last month due to con­cerns about hit­ting its pur­chase caps, cen­tral bank­ing sources said, in a move that could mean those coun­tries stand to ben­e­fit less from the scheme.

With almost a year left of its quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing pro­gramme, the ECB is already near­ing a self-imposed lim­it of hold­ing a third of the coun­tries’ debt due to the large amounts of bonds it bought under pre­vi­ous cri­sis-fight­ing mea­sures.

This became an issue when the ECB increased its month­ly asset buys to 80 bil­lion euros in April from 60 bil­lion euros. Data shows that so far pur­chas­es have increased by more than 50 per­cent in most euro zone coun­tries but only by 16 per­cent in Por­tu­gal and 33 per­cent in Ire­land.

Two sources famil­iar with the sit­u­a­tion said the ECB and nation­al cen­tral banks that con­duct the buy­ing had sup­ple­ment­ed Por­tuguese and Irish bonds with the debt of supra­na­tion­als to avoid hav­ing to cur­tail buy­ing of their debt more rad­i­cal­ly or even hav­ing to cut them off com­plete­ly once it hits its lim­its.

The cur­tailed buy­ing means that the ECB’s sov­er­eign debt pur­chas­es will devi­ate slight­ly from the coun­tries’ share­hold­ing in the cen­tral bank, called the cap­i­tal key, pos­si­bly mut­ing the pos­i­tive mar­ket impact of the scheme in Por­tu­gal and Ire­land.

...

While QE has pushed bor­row­ing costs in the euro zone to record lows in many coun­tries, some investors say that uneven pur­chas­es of sov­er­eign debt could mean vul­ner­a­ble coun­tries like Por­tu­gal do not ben­e­fit as much as the bloc’s largest econ­o­my, Ger­many, there­by esca­lat­ing polit­i­cal ten­sion in the region.

“If the ECB is going to tar­get pur­chas­es on some sov­er­eigns at the expense of oth­er sov­er­eigns, then effec­tive­ly you have got an unequal appli­ca­tion of that mon­e­tary pol­i­cy,” said Mark Dowd­ing, a port­fo­lio man­ag­er at Blue­Bay Asset Man­age­ment.

“In extrem­is, you are say­ing that this is going away from a trend where you are try­ing to bring Europe togeth­er, and it is look­ing more like some­thing that could push Europe apart.”

LEFTOVERS

The sources said the ECB was keen to keep both coun­tries in the pro­gramme until the pro­ject­ed end of the scheme in March 2017, but said that the buy­ing could still fluc­tu­ate over time and that the ECB also reviews its issuer lim­it every six months.

Left over from its Secu­ri­ties Mar­kets Pro­gramme, a scheme launched in 2010 to tack­le an esca­lat­ing debt cri­sis, the ECB held 9.7 bil­lion euros of Irish debt at the start of 2016 while its Por­tuguese hold­ings stood at 12.4 bil­lion euros. Since the start of QE, the ECB has bought 11 bil­lion euros of Irish debt and 16.2 bil­lion in Por­tu­gal.

The ECB’s issuer lim­it also sug­gests that if Greece joins the pro­gramme, ECB pur­chas­es will be severe­ly cur­tailed as the bank is already one of the big­ger hold­ers of Greek debt.

The ECB has already stopped pur­chas­es in Cyprus because the coun­try does not have the nec­es­sary cred­it rat­ing and keeps sov­er­eign buys lim­it­ed in sev­er­al coun­tries, like Esto­nia, for liq­uid­i­ty rea­sons.

“This became an issue when the ECB increased its month­ly asset buys to 80 bil­lion euros in April from 60 bil­lion euros. Data shows that so far pur­chas­es have increased by more than 50 per­cent in most euro zone coun­tries but only by 16 per­cent in Por­tu­gal and 33 per­cent in Ire­land.

That was the sit­u­a­tion back in May, short­ly after the ECB expand­ed its month­ly QE bond pur­chas­es from 60 bil­lion to 80 bil­lion euros a month. Most of the euro­zone coun­tries saw a 50 per­cent increase in bond pur­chas­es but Ire­land and Por­tu­gal, two of the coun­tries that the QE pro­gram was intend­ed to help, were forced to under­shoot the increase rel­a­tive to what the “cap­i­tal key” would have called for.

But that was far from the only eco­nom­ic warn­ing sign flash­ing for Por­tu­gal at the time. As the arti­cle below points out, Por­tu­gal is just one cred­it rat­ings down­grade away from get­ting kicked out of the ECB’s QE pro­gram entire­ly. And if that hap­pens, Por­tu­gal will face a dilem­ma that’s now painful­ly famil­iar for the euro­zone: leave, or under­go anoth­er round of “bailouts” (bru­tal aus­ter­i­ty) with the hopes of reen­ter­ing the QE pro­gram lat­er:

The Wall Street Jour­nal

Portugal’s Finan­cial Inde­pen­dence Hangs by a Thread
Country’s access to ECB bond-buy­ing pro­gram depends on debt rat­ing by Cana­di­an firm DBRS

By Patri­cia Kows­mann
April 29, 2016 12:30 a.m. ET

LISBON—Nearly two years after Por­tu­gal left a €78 bil­lion ($88 bil­lion) inter­na­tion­al bailout pro­gram, its finan­cial inde­pen­dence con­tin­ues to hang by a thread.

That thread is a lit­tle-known Cana­di­an firm, DBRS Ltd., the only rat­ing com­pa­ny that main­tains an invest­ment-grade rat­ing on Por­tuguese debt. That rat­ing gives Por­tu­gal access to the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank’s bond-buy­ing pro­gram, which has kept bond yields low and rel­a­tive­ly sta­ble despite recent glob­al mar­ket tur­moil, a Decem­ber bank fail­ure and fric­tion between Euro­pean Union offi­cials and the country’s new gov­ern­ment over its bud­get plans.

On Fri­day, DBRS will announce the result of its twice-year­ly review of Por­tu­gal. A down­grade to junk status—the rat­ing the coun­try gets from Stan­dard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Ser­vice and Fitch Ratings—would force it out of the ECB pro­gram and raise bor­row­ing costs for its gov­ern­ment, banks and com­pa­nies.

That, in turn, could reawak­en fears over Portugal’s future in the euro­zone and the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the bloc itself, which is strug­gling to man­age Greece’s fis­cal trou­bles. Por­tu­gal would be required to take a new bailout to get a chance to re-enter the ECB pro­gram.

...

“The fact that the country’s future in sov­er­eign debt mar­kets hinges upon a sin­gle deci­sion shows that Por­tu­gal is still in a very del­i­cate sit­u­a­tion,” said Anto­nio Bar­roso, an ana­lyst at polit­i­cal-risk con­sul­tan­cy Teneo Intel­li­gence. “It is also a reminder for politi­cians both in Lis­bon and in Brus­sels that they should be doing more in order to pre­vent a return of the cri­sis to the euro­zone.”

Dur­ing its three-year bailout pro­gram, which end­ed in May 2014, Por­tu­gal was con­sid­ered an exem­plary fol­low­er of the Ger­many-led aus­ter­i­ty mod­el. The cen­ter-right gov­ern­ment at the time, led by Prime Min­is­ter Pedro Pas­sos Coel­ho, cut pub­lic employ­ees’ wages, raised tax­es and slashed spend­ing to bal­ance its accounts. The bud­get deficit fell sharply, from close to 10% of gross domes­tic prod­uct in 2010 to 3% of GDP last year, exclud­ing a cap­i­tal injec­tion into a failed lender.

Mr. Pas­sos Coel­ho pri­va­tized state com­pa­nies and changed labor reg­u­la­tions to bring down labor costs and make exports more com­pet­i­tive.

Still, Portugal’s econ­o­my strug­gles. Exports are ris­ing, but so are imports. Invest­ments remain scarce. Unem­ploy­ment exceeds 12%.

The Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund pre­dict­ed recent­ly that Portugal’s econ­o­my would grow an aver­age of 1.3% a year over the next six years, too slow­ly to reduce a debt bur­den that stands at 129% of GDP.

Portugal’s per­cep­tion among investors has been hit by two bank fail­ures since 2014 and the elec­tion of a Social­ist-led gov­ern­ment that has raised the min­i­mum wage and promised to raise pub­lic-sec­tor wages and low­er tax­es.

Social­ist Prime Min­is­ter António Cos­ta, who took office late last year with the back­ing of three far-left par­ties, has soft­ened his rhetor­i­cal attack on his predecessor’s aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures. He has agreed to make deep­er bud­get cuts this year to avoid a fight with the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion.

...

Even if it man­ages to avoid a down­grade now, pres­sure on Por­tu­gal is expect­ed to grow.

DBRS has cit­ed a glob­al eco­nom­ic slow­down, debt sus­tain­abil­i­ty and a rise in bond yields as fac­tors to watch.

As he cuts the bud­get, Mr. Cos­ta could be forced to choose between alien­at­ing his far-left allies in par­lia­ment or con­fronting the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion and its fis­cal rules.

“The biggest con­cern that we would have would be [an] open con­flict with the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion,” Fer­gus McCormick, head sov­er­eign ana­lyst at DBRS, said in Feb­ru­ary.

Dur­ing its three-year bailout pro­gram, which end­ed in May 2014, Por­tu­gal was con­sid­ered an exem­plary fol­low­er of the Ger­many-led aus­ter­i­ty mod­el. The cen­ter-right gov­ern­ment at the time, led by Prime Min­is­ter Pedro Pas­sos Coel­ho, cut pub­lic employ­ees’ wages, raised tax­es and slashed spend­ing to bal­ance its accounts. The bud­get deficit fell sharply, from close to 10% of gross domes­tic prod­uct in 2010 to 3% of GDP last year, exclud­ing a cap­i­tal injec­tion into a failed lender.”

And despite being con­sid­ered an exem­plary fol­low­er of Ger­many-led aus­ter­i­ty, Por­tu­gal’s econ­o­my is still so frag­ile that a sin­gle cred­it rat­ing down­grade could kick it out of the ECB’s QE program...a pro­gram designed to help the euro­zone’s weak­est economies. Isn’t the euro­zone fun?

For­tu­nate­ly for Por­tu­gal, DBRS — the last cred­it rat­ing agency left in the world that gives Por­tu­gal’s debt an invest­ment grade rat­ing — did reaf­firm Por­tu­gals cred­it rat­ing back in April. And did so again in Octo­ber. So, for now, Por­tu­gal is still able to par­tic­i­pate in the QE pro­gram that is vital to its eco­nom­ic recov­ery. But just bare­ly.

And as we saw above, there’s still the issue of less Por­tuguese bonds being bought under the QE pro­gram than the “cap­i­tal key” war­rants due to con­cerns over the coun­try hit­ting that 33 per­cent cap before the QE pro­gram final­ly winds down. So even if ECB extends the QE pro­gram past its March 2017 dead­line, the ques­tion of how Por­tu­gal would get around these bar­ri­ers remained.

The ECB’s Dis­ap­point­ing Sep­tem­ber. And Ter­ri­fy­ing Taper Talk in Octo­ber

And what did the ECB even­tu­al­ly decide to do with Ger­many run­ning out of eli­gi­ble bonds and coun­tries like Por­tu­gal and Ire­land hit­ting their 33 per­cent cap? Well, also keep in mind that the cur­rent round of the ECB’s QE pro­gram is sched­uled to expire in March of 2017. So with a num­ber of euro­zone economies still in dan­ger­ous­ly frag­ile ter­ri­to­ry the expec­ta­tion back in Sep­tem­ber was that, at a min­i­mum, the ECB was going to announce an exten­sion of its QE pro­gram past March 2017 dur­ing is meet­ing on Sep­tem­ber 8th. And, or course, that did­n’t hap­pen, despite a cut in the esti­mat­ed eco­nom­ic growth fore­cast:

CNBC

ECB sur­pris­es by fail­ing to extend QE dead­line; cuts euro zone growth fore­casts

Katy Bar­na­to
Thurs­day, 8 Sep 2016 | 9:06 AM ET

The Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank (ECB) sur­prised mar­kets on Thurs­day by fail­ing to extend the dead­line for its tril­lion-euro bond-buy­ing pro­gram.

Expec­ta­tions were high the cen­tral bank would pro­long­ing the pro­gram beyond its cur­rent dead­line of March 2017, but it did not do so.

The euro zone STOXX 50 index fell on the news, but the euro rose slight­ly against the U.S. dol­lar to near a two-week high. The yields on Ger­man bench­mark 10-year Bunds turned slight­ly less neg­a­tive.

ECB Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi said the cen­tral bank did not dis­cuss extend­ing the pro­gram at its lat­est mon­e­tary pol­i­cy meet­ing.

“Our pro­gram is effec­tive and we should focus on its imple­men­ta­tion,” he said at his reg­u­lar post-deci­sion media con­fer­ence on Thurs­day.

The ECB held its key inter­est rates unchanged on Thurs­day, as expect­ed. The rate on the ECB’s mar­gin­al lend­ing facil­i­ty stands at 0.25 per­cent, with the rate on the deposit facil­i­ty at ‑0.4 per­cent. The fixed rate on the ECB’s main refi­nanc­ing oper­a­tions remains at zero. The ECB last moved rates in March, when it cut the rate on the mar­gin­al lend­ing facil­i­ty by 5 basis points.

Despite the ECB’s mon­e­tary stim­u­lus pro­gram — which includes low or neg­a­tive rates, low-inter­est loans to banks and a tril­lion-euro bond-buy­ing pro­gram — the euro zone’s eco­nom­ic growth and infla­tion rate remain stub­born­ly low.

On Thurs­day, the cen­tral bank raised its eco­nom­ic growth out­look for the euro zone slight­ly for 2016, but cut it for 2017 and 2018. It now sees growth in the 19-coun­try bloc aver­ag­ing 1.7 per­cent this year, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly fore­cast 1.6 per­cent growth. It fore­casts expan­sion of 1.6 per­cent in 2017 and 2018, down from its June fore­cast of 1.7 per­cent in both years.

The cen­tral bank’s 2016 infla­tion fore­cast was held at 0.2 per­cent and its 2018 esti­mate stayed at 1.6 per­cent. How­ev­er, it cut its 2017 fore­cast to 1.2 per­cent from 1.3 per­cent.

“We will pre­serve the very sub­stan­tial amount of mon­e­tary sup­port that is embed­ded in our staff pro­jec­tions and that is nec­es­sary to secure a return to infla­tion,” Draghi said in his state­ment.

Draghi said the ECB’s mon­e­tary stim­u­lus would boost euro zone eco­nom­ic growth by 0.6 per­cent over the fore­cast hori­zon and infla­tion by 0.4 per­cent.

The euro zone’s econ­o­my is seen being ham­pered by slug­gish glob­al demand, due to sev­er­al fac­tors, includ­ing the U.K.‘s vote in June to quit the Euro­pean Union, he added.

The ECB’s infla­tion fore­casts are par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant, as the cen­tral bank has a sin­gle man­date to tar­get price sta­bil­i­ty. It aims for infla­tion of close to, but below 2 per­cent over the medi­um term. Aver­age infla­tion in the bloc, based on non-har­mo­nized nation­al con­sumer price index­es fell below 1.75 per­cent in March 2013, kept on falling, and is cur­rent­ly around 0.2 per­cent.

Pri­or to Thurs­day’s announce­ment, there was spec­u­la­tion the ECB might extend the dead­line on its quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing pro­gram. The ECB has extend­ed the dead­line before, upped its month­ly asset-pur­chas­es of secu­ri­ties to 80 bil­lion euros ($90 bil­lion) from 60 bil­lion euros and expand­ed the pro­gram to include cor­po­rate bond-buy­ing.

Focus has now shift­ed to whether the ECB will announce an exten­sion to the pro­gram lat­er this year.

...

“On Thurs­day, the cen­tral bank raised its eco­nom­ic growth out­look for the euro zone slight­ly for 2016, but cut it for 2017 and 2018. It now sees growth in the 19-coun­try bloc aver­ag­ing 1.7 per­cent this year, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly fore­cast 1.6 per­cent growth. It fore­casts expan­sion of 1.6 per­cent in 2017 and 2018, down from its June fore­cast of 1.7 per­cent in both years.”

After low­er­ing its growth fore­casts for 2017 and 2018 slight­ly, ECB’s response back in Sep­tem­ber to the ques­tion of whether or not it’s going to extend the QE pro­gram past March: The ECB was­n’t sure. Check back lat­er in the year.

So that was the ECB’s posi­tion on the future of QE back in Sep­tem­ber. But by ear­ly Octo­ber anoth­er mes­sage start­ed ema­nat­ing from ECB pol­i­cy-mak­ing cir­cles: If the ECB decides to dis­con­tin­ue the QE pro­gram, don’t expect those month­ly ECB bond pur­chas­es to end sud­den­ly. Instead, much like what the Fed­er­al Reserve did to even­tu­al­ly end its QE pro­gram, mar­kets should expect the end of the ECB QE’s to come in the form of a “taper” where the month­ly ECB bond pur­chas­es are steadi­ly low­ered to even­tu­al­ly zero. And while the idea of “taper­ing” the QE makes a lot of sense and isn’t all that notable, hav­ing anony­mous leaks to the press that the ECB was think­ing about “taper­ing” at a time when the euro­zone economies are still very frag­ile and every­one is won­der if the QE is going to be extend­ed at all was pret­ty notable. And alarm­ing:

The Finan­cial Times

Why euro­zone bonds are rat­tled by taper talk

Germany’s 10-year Bund approach­ing a pos­i­tive yield for the first time in two weeks

by: Elaine Moore
Octo­ber 6, 2016

Euro­pean bond mar­kets are being rat­tled by talk that the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank is con­sid­er­ing ways to call time on its €80bn-a-month bond-pur­chase pro­gramme before the March 2017 end date.

While the ECB has denied the reports, bonds across the euro­zone are sell­ing off — with Germany’s 10-year Bund yield on the cusp of turn­ing pos­i­tive for the first time in two weeks.

What’s rat­tling traders?

On Tues­day, Bloomberg pub­lished a sto­ry cit­ing unnamed sources who claimed that the ECB was think­ing of wind­ing down its bond pur­chas­es in steps of €10bn a month ahead of its plans for QE to end in March, trig­ger­ing an imme­di­ate jump in yields across bond mar­kets.

The ECB is adamant that QE taper­ing is not up for dis­cus­sion, with Michael Steen, head of media rela­tions at the ECB, tweet­ing that the “gov­ern­ing coun­cil has not dis­cussed these top­ics, as Draghi said at last press con­fer­ence and dur­ing tes­ti­mo­ny at the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment”.

Is this a taper tantrum?

Taper is not a word finan­cial mar­kets like to hear. Bench­mark 10-year gov­ern­ment bond yields of Ger­many, France, Italy and Spain all jumped about 4 basis points in the space of an hour and have con­tin­ued to climb.

The moves illus­trate how depen­dent investors have become on mass bond-buy­ing pro­grammes from cen­tral banks in Europe, the UK and Japan — but so far this sell-off does not com­pare with the “taper tantrum” trig­gered in 2013 by the US Fed­er­al Reserve plans to slow down its QE pur­chas­es.

Yields on Germany’s 10-year Bund — a proxy for wider Euro­pean mar­kets — are up a few basis points not per­cent­age points and remain far low­er on the year.

What do investors think?

Bond strate­gists and fund man­agers seem torn between sus­pi­cion that there is no smoke with­out fire and con­vic­tion that with euro­zone infla­tion still low, any talk of taper­ing seems pre­ma­ture.

JPMor­gan notes that views attrib­uted to anony­mous “sources” should be viewed with cau­tion, not­ing that end­ing QE and rais­ing inter­est rates would be dif­fi­cult with infla­tion at cur­rent rates.

In fact, falling bond yields in recent months sug­gest investors had been expect­ing the ECB to relax its self-imposed lim­its and expand the uni­verse of assets it can buy in order to address scarci­ty in the euro­zone gov­ern­ment bonds eli­gi­ble for QE.

Fred­erik Ducrozet at Pictet has anoth­er idea. Per­haps, he says, con­ver­sa­tions about taper­ing are being used to soft­en up ECB gov­ern­ing coun­cil mem­bers who oppose an exten­sion of the pro­gramme — such as Jens Wei­d­mann, head of the Bun­des­bank.

“The leaks could also be a super­fi­cial con­ces­sion to the hawks ahead of a deci­sion to extend QE,” he says. “A way to reas­sure them that an exit plan for QE exists, even if it is enlarged in the short term.”

...

What will hap­pen next?

The next meet­ing of the ECB’s gov­ern­ing coun­cil is on Octo­ber 27 but pol­i­cy­mak­ers are not expect­ed to make a deci­sion on QE until lat­er in the year, after the infla­tion fore­cast for 2019 is pub­lished. If infla­tion looks as though it will con­tin­ue to under­shoot then the case for QE exten­sion will be stronger.

Andrew Bosom­worth, Pimco’s head of port­fo­lio man­age­ment in Ger­many, says QE must end at some point, but points out that it will be a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act.

“It will be dif­fi­cult for the ECB to stop QE with­out there being an impact on bond yields,” he says. “And the ECB has to be care­ful to nav­i­gate the exit in such a way that yields do not rise to such lev­els that indebt­ed coun­tries have dif­fi­cul­ty — some­thing that could reignite the threat of anoth­er euro­zone sov­er­eign debt cri­sis.”

“Bond strate­gists and fund man­agers seem torn between sus­pi­cion that there is no smoke with­out fire and con­vic­tion that with euro­zone infla­tion still low, any talk of taper­ing seems pre­ma­ture.”

Yeah, it’s hard to see why talk of a how the ECB might “taper” the QE pro­gram would­n’t spook the mar­kets. But the rea­son such talk would spook the mar­kets — the rea­son being that the euro­zone economies are still dan­ger­ous­ly frag­ile and end­ing QE pre­ma­ture­ly could be a dis­as­ter — also hap­pens to be the rea­son such talk is hard to inter­pet. Because taper­ing the QE makes absolute­ly no sense in the cur­rent con­text. And yet such talk did report­ed­ly take place, at least accord­ing to anony­mous sources, although the ECB denied the reports.

The ECB’s Less Than Enthu­si­as­tic Response to Trump in Novem­ber

So what did the ECB final­ly decide to do about the future of the QE pro­gram dur­ing its Decem­ber 8th meet­ing? Well, before we get to that, note that there was anoth­er rather sig­nif­i­cant event that took place recent­ly that would also rea­son­ably impact the ECB’s deci­sion-mak­ing regard­ing the future of QE: the elec­tion of Don­ald Trump. And based on the com­ments com­ing from the ECB offi­cials in the weeks fol­low­ing Trump’s win, despite the expec­ta­tions of ris­ing infla­tion and the talk of a new US fis­cal stim­u­lus pro­gram, the ECB offi­cials did­n’t appear to see a Trump admin­is­tra­tion as like­ly help­ful for the euro­zone. And pos­si­bly very unhelp­ful:

Reuters

ECB fears pop­ulist back­lash after Trump’s win: sources

By Francesco Canepa and Bal­azs Koranyi | FRANKFURT
Fri Nov 18, 2016 | 10:13am EST

Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank offi­cials are grow­ing increas­ing­ly wor­ried that Don­ald Trump’s vic­to­ry in the U.S. pres­i­den­tial race may harm the euro zone by hurt­ing trade with the Unit­ed States and fuelling pop­ulism.

Speak­ing pub­licly and behind the scenes, ECB offi­cials empha­sise any U.S. shift towards pro­tec­tion­ism under Trump could hurt the already frag­ile euro zone econ­o­my and pave the way for an even stronger back­lash against glob­al­i­sa­tion and the euro project.

This could hin­der the ECB’s efforts to revive growth and infla­tion in the euro zone just as the eco­nom­ic pic­ture was start­ing to look less bleak.

If they only looked at finan­cial mar­kets, ECB rate set­ters should be mod­er­ate­ly pleased: euro zone infla­tion expec­ta­tions, bond yields and stocks have all gone up since Trump’s vic­to­ry, show­ing investors are bet­ting on spend­ing-led stronger U.S. eco­nom­ic growth.

In addi­tion, high­er bond yields have eased imme­di­ate con­cerns the ECB may run out of Ger­man debt to buy in its 1.74 tril­lion euros asset-pur­chase pro­gramme, the cen­tre-piece of its stim­u­lus strat­e­gy.

How­ev­er, top offi­cials stress the sit­u­a­tion is far more com­plex than this and the ECB still looks still set to announce an exten­sion of its bond buy­ing beyond their March dead­line at the bank’s Dec. 8 meet­ing.

First, ris­ing bor­row­ing costs for indebt­ed periph­er­al gov­ern­ments show that investors are pric­ing in ris­ing polit­i­cal risk in the euro zone as anti-glob­al­i­sa­tion and euroscep­tic voic­es are embold­ened by Trump’s win, which came hard on the heels of the Brex­it vote.

This was par­tic­u­lar­ly vis­i­ble in Italy where the gov­ern­men­t’s bor­row­ing costs were on track on Fri­day for their biggest two-week rise since the 2012 debt cri­sis and bank­ing stocks fell ahead of a Dec. 4 ref­er­en­dum that could unseat pro-euro Prime Min­is­ter Mat­teo Ren­zi.

“The over­all (mar­ket) sig­nal is not clear cut,” a cen­tral bank offi­cial said, stress­ing it was still too ear­ly to con­sid­er any coun­ter­move.

Sec­ond, Vice Pres­i­dent Vitor Con­stan­cio has warned that any fis­cal eas­ing in the Unit­ed States — such as Trump’s planned infra­struc­ture spend­ing — may not ben­e­fit the euro zone if the new U.S. admin­is­tra­tion sticks to its ‘Amer­i­ca first’ pledge, hurt­ing Europe’s exports to its biggest trad­ing part­ner.

Even a hawk­ish mem­ber of the ECB’s Exec­u­tive Board, Yves Mer­sch, warned that growth in the euro zone was still “frag­ile” and the infla­tion pick-up not yet sus­tain­able.

This was fur­ther empha­sised by Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi, who said on Fri­day the recov­ery relied on con­tin­ued mon­e­tary sup­port from the ECB.

Both Mer­sch and Draghi also warned that rolling back finan­cial reg­u­la­tion could pave the way for a repeat of the 2008 cri­sis, a thin­ly veiled ref­er­ence to Trump’s cam­paign promise to ease those rules.

Mean­while, con­fi­dence remains low that euro zone gov­ern­ments will heed the ECB’s long-stand­ing call for greater fis­cal spend­ing in sur­plus coun­tries such as Ger­many, despite a Euro­pean Com­mis­sion’s plea for loos­er strings this week.

“In prin­ci­ple, we wel­come any pro­pos­al for growth sup­port­ive fis­cal pol­i­cy,” Mer­sch told Reuters this week. “But we have not seen the details and there have been some dis­ap­point­ments in this regard in the past.”

...

“Speak­ing pub­licly and behind the scenes, ECB offi­cials empha­sise any U.S. shift towards pro­tec­tion­ism under Trump could hurt the already frag­ile euro zone econ­o­my and pave the way for an even stronger back­lash against glob­al­i­sa­tion and the euro project.”

Well, that cer­tain­ly sounds like a Trump vic­to­ry would make the ECB more, not less, like­ly to announce an exten­sion of the extend the QE dur­ing its Decem­ber 8th meet­ing. And giv­en that ris­ing bond yields in response to Trump’s vic­to­ry increased the num­ber of Ger­man bonds above ‑0.4 per­cent, more bonds will be avail­able for the ECB to pur­chase and, one might assume, the ECB would be less like­ly to pur­sue the option of low­er­ing the min­i­mum bond yield the ECB can pur­chase below that ‑0.4 thresh­old.

The ECB’s Very Dis­ap­point­ing Decem­ber. Very Vague­ly Dis­ap­point­ing

So let’s take a moment to sum­ma­rize the ECB’s QE conun­drum this year:

1. The QE pro­gram was expand­ing back in March from 60 bil­lion to 80 bil­lion euros in bond pur­chas­es each month, reflect­ing per­sis­tent near-defla­tion and weak economies.

2. The cur­rent QE pro­gram is sched­ule to end in March of 2017, despite the fact that the euro­zone infla­tion lev­els are close to 0 per­cent and its economies remain extreme­ly weak.

3. The ECB’s QE pro­gram has sev­er­al self-imposed rules that deter­mine which bonds, and in what vol­umes, the ECB can pur­chase and because of those rules and the lack of Ger­man bonds above a ‑0.4 per­cent yield, a sit­u­a­tion was approach­ing were QE pro­gram could­n’t con­tin­ue with­out break­ing those rules.

4. Ire­land and Por­tu­gal were also hit­ting a QE wall due to the QE rules that caps the total ECB bond hold­ings to 33 per­cent for a giv­en coun­try and had already reduced their QE bond pur­chas­es below what the “cap­i­tal key” allowed because of this.

5. If Por­tu­gal’s bond rat­ing is cut by the last remain­ing cred­it rat­ing agency to give it an invest­ment-grade rat­ing, Por­tu­gal is out of the QE and back into “bailout” aus­ter­i­ty ter­ri­to­ry.

6. Head­ing into the ECB’s Sep­tem­ber 8th meet­ing, the mar­kets were expect an announce­ment of an exten­sion of the QE pro­gram past March. That did­n’t hap­pen. Although a cut in the eco­nom­ic growth fore­cast did hap­pen.

7. In ear­ly Octo­ber, reports that the ECB was already engag­ing in “taper talk” con­fused and spooked the mar­kets.

8. And, final­ly, fol­low­ing the elec­tion of Don­ald Trump, ECB offi­cials made it clear that they saw this as increas­ing­ly, not decreas­ing, the risks for the euro­zone economies.

And giv­en all that, did the ECB final­ly drop the “cap­i­tal key” or the 33 per­cent cap like most experts rec­om­mend­ed so it could stop buy­ing Ger­man bonds (dri­ving yields deep­er into neg­a­tive ter­ri­to­ry) and focus on weak­er economies? Of course not. Instead, it cut the min­i­mum deposit rate to below ‑0.40 so it could find more eli­gi­ble Ger­man bonds. And also cut the total ECB month­ly QE bond pur­chas­es by 25 per­cent, a move wide­ly inter­pret­ed as the start of a much-feared pre­ma­ture “taper”:

The Wall Street Jour­nal

ECB Extends but Scales Back Stim­u­lus, Whip­saw­ing Mar­kets
Bank’s move to buoy Europe’s econ­o­my comes days before Fed is expect­ed to raise inter­est rates in U.S.

By Tom Fair­less
Updat­ed Dec. 8, 2016 3:07 p.m. ET

FRANKFURT—The Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank pro­longed its extra­or­di­nary life­line to weak euro­zone economies on Thurs­day, just days before the U.S. Fed­er­al Reserve is expect­ed to move in the oppo­site direc­tion and raise inter­est rates.

That diver­gence, along with dif­fi­cul­ty in read­ing the nuances of the ECB’s action, caused investors to ini­tial­ly boost the euro before send­ing it low­er as U.S. equi­ty mar­kets hit record highs.

The ECB sur­prised mar­kets by say­ing it would slow the pace of its asset pur­chas­es, spark­ing a debate over whether the ECB had start­ed down the path toward end­ing its mon­e­tary stim­u­lus. Such a move—swiftly denied by the ECB—might be wel­comed by some of the bank’s top offi­cials, who are eager to sig­nal an even­tu­al exit.

Instead, the ECB’s deci­sion was most­ly tak­en as a sign the euro­zone bad­ly needs the type of sup­port that the Fed next week could begin remov­ing from the U.S., amid evi­dence and expec­ta­tions of sol­id eco­nom­ic growth there.

...

The ECB said on Thurs­day it would extend its so-called quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing pro­gram by nine months, until at least the end of next year, tak­ing its total size above €2.2 tril­lion ($2.36 tril­lion). But start­ing in April, the bank will reduce the val­ue of secu­ri­ties it buys per month to €60 bil­lion from €80 bil­lion.

Investors had con­sid­ered such a move unlike­ly, bet­ting that the ECB would con­tin­ue to buy bonds at the cur­rent pace for at least anoth­er six months. Finan­cial mar­kets ini­tial­ly react­ed neg­a­tive­ly, with the price of shares and bonds falling sharply, and the euro ris­ing against the dol­lar. Mar­kets lat­er reversed much of that fall.

The ECB’s deci­sion to slight­ly lift its foot off the gas, as some saw it, comes despite slug­gish growth and mount­ing polit­i­cal uncer­tain­ty across the 19-nation euro­zone, which faces a string of major elec­tions next year and fall­out from Italy’s rejec­tion of con­sti­tu­tion­al changes ear­li­er this week. The move is like­ly to have been backed by some hawk­ish mem­bers of the cen­tral bank’s 25-mem­ber gov­ern­ing coun­cil, who have ear­li­er sig­naled they seek a clear path out of the bank’s easy-mon­ey poli­cies.

...

ECB Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi took pains at a press con­fer­ence Thurs­day to stress that the bank’s deci­sion didn’t amount to taper­ing, or wind­ing down, the bank’s stim­u­lus. He warned that infla­tion in the euro­zone remained too weak and said the ECB would keep buy­ing bonds for some time.

“There is no ques­tion about taper­ing,” Mr. Draghi said. “Taper­ing has not been dis­cussed today.”

...

Mas­sive cen­tral-bank buy­ing has helped buoy mar­kets in recent years, and investors keep buy­ing on the belief that such stim­u­lus will con­tin­ue. But more recent­ly, investors have debat­ed whether the ECB would begin to taper its aid in light of a rosier eco­nom­ic pic­ture and con­cerns over poten­tial side effects of its his­tor­i­cal­ly loose mon­e­tary pol­i­cy.

On Thurs­day, investors decid­ed the ECB, for now, wasn’t look­ing to turn off the taps.

...

Still, many investors weren’t con­vinced by Mr. Draghi’s argu­ments. At times on Thurs­day, the ECB chief veered into seman­tic gym­nas­tics in an appar­ent effort to avoid the kind of “taper tantrum” seen in the U.S. in 2013, when the Fed sug­gest­ed it might wind down its own bond-pur­chase pro­gram.

True taper­ing, Mr. Draghi argued, would involve grad­u­al­ly reduc­ing the pace of bond pur­chas­es to zero. That move wasn’t dis­cussed “and is not even on the table,” he said.

“This was a taper, as much as [Mr. Draghi] wants to deny it,” said Tim Graf, Euro­pean head of macro strat­e­gy at State Street in Lon­don. But Mr. Graf wel­comed said the ECB’s deci­sion to extend its pur­chas­es for longer than expect­ed would post­pone any fresh debate on the QE pro­gram until after key Euro­pean elec­tions next year.

“The big Christ­mas present was time,” Mr. Graf said.

Mr. Draghi said the ECB’s deci­sion had received “very, very broad con­sen­sus” from the bank’s 25-mem­ber gov­ern­ing coun­cil. Top ECB offi­cials have been rais­ing con­cerns about the adverse side effects of the bank’s easy-mon­ey poli­cies. Bun­des­bank Pres­i­dent Jens Wei­d­mann, long an oppo­nent of the ECB’s bond pur­chas­es, vot­ed against Thursday’s deci­sion.

“This is a step in the right direc­tion,” said Clemens Fuest, pres­i­dent of Germany’s Ifo eco­nom­ic insti­tute, a promi­nent crit­ic of the ECB’s stim­u­lus poli­cies.

Michael Heise, chief econ­o­mist at Allianz SE in Munich, point­ed to the ECB’s state­ment that it could accel­er­ate its bond pur­chas­es again if need­ed. That “can’t be described as taper­ing,” Mr. Heise said.

Oth­ers were less con­vinced. “Today was a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­vide some sort of sup­port to the mar­ket into a very uncer­tain polit­i­cal cal­en­dar in 2017,” said Patrick O’Donnell, an invest­ment man­ag­er at Aberdeen Asset Man­age­ment.

The ECB also announced changes to the design of its QE pro­gram on Thurs­day, to ensure it can con­tin­ue to find enough bonds to buy. Mr. Draghi said that from Jan­u­ary the ECB could start buy­ing debt that yields below the minus 0.4% inter­est rate it pays on com­mer­cial bank deposits, some­thing its own rules had barred it from doing. That move was aimed at address­ing a scarci­ty of Ger­man bonds. And Mr. Draghi said that the ECB would start buy­ing bonds with matu­ri­ties of one year, down from the pre­vi­ous min­i­mum matu­ri­ty of two years.

The ECB also announced changes to the design of its QE pro­gram on Thurs­day, to ensure it can con­tin­ue to find enough bonds to buy. Mr. Draghi said that from Jan­u­ary the ECB could start buy­ing debt that yields below the minus 0.4% inter­est rate it pays on com­mer­cial bank deposits, some­thing its own rules had barred it from doing. That move was aimed at address­ing a scarci­ty of Ger­man bonds. And Mr. Draghi said that the ECB would start buy­ing bonds with matu­ri­ties of one year, down from the pre­vi­ous min­i­mum matu­ri­ty of two years.”

Yes, one of the worst options the ECB had for extend­ing its QE pro­gram — drop­ping the low­er lim­it on the bond yields it could pur­chase so it could find more Ger­man bonds to buy — is the option it end­ed up going with. And while Bun­des­bank pres­i­dent Jens Wei­d­mann vot­ed against the ECB’s deci­sion to extend the QE to the end of 2017, it’s hard to imag­ine that he was­n’t extreme­ly pleased by the over­all out­come. After all, the mar­kets were gen­er­al­ly expect­ing a QE exten­sion head­ing into that meet­ing. But they weren’t expect­ing the start of a QE taper too. Or some­thing that could be inter­pret­ted as the start of a taper. And if the pres­i­dent of Germany’s Ifo eco­nom­ic insti­tute thinks this was a “step in the right direc­tion”, jens Wei­d­mann would almost cer­tain­ly agree:

...
The ECB’s deci­sion to slight­ly lift its foot off the gas, as some saw it, comes despite slug­gish growth and mount­ing polit­i­cal uncer­tain­ty across the 19-nation euro­zone, which faces a string of major elec­tions next year and fall­out from Italy’s rejec­tion of con­sti­tu­tion­al changes ear­li­er this week. The move is like­ly to have been backed by some hawk­ish mem­bers of the cen­tral bank’s 25-mem­ber gov­ern­ing coun­cil, who have ear­li­er sig­naled they seek a clear path out of the bank’s easy-mon­ey poli­cies.
...

“This is a step in the right direc­tion,” said Clemens Fuest, pres­i­dent of Germany’s Ifo eco­nom­ic insti­tute, a promi­nent crit­ic of the ECB’s stim­u­lus poli­cies.

...

Now, keep in mind that ECB pres­i­dent Mario Draghi went to lengths to assure mar­kets that this was­n’t actu­al­ly the start of a true taper like Wei­d­mann or the rest of the pro-aus­ter­i­ty crowd would pre­fer. But also keep in mind that Draghi’s expla­na­tion for why this should­n’t be inter­pret­ted as the start of a taper — that a 25 per­cent cut in the month­ly bond pur­chas­es should­n’t be con­sid­ered the start of a taper because the cut was­n’t declared as part of an over­all plan to bring the month­ly asset pur­chas­es down to zero — isn’t exact­ly con­vinc­ing. Because while it’s cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble that the cut in month­ly bond pur­chas­es isn’t part of a secret­ly planned taper, it’s also the case that if the ECB want­ed to start the taper now, but did­n’t want to offi­cial­ly announce it and spook the mar­kets, doing some­thing like declar­ing this cut in bond pur­chas­es at the same time the ECB announces a 9 month exten­sion to the QE pro­gram — when the mar­kets were expect­ing a six month exten­sion — is the kind of vague mixed mes­sag­ing we might expect from the ECB.

So it’s pos­si­ble we could be see­ing the stealth start of a real taper. Or maybe Draghi was sin­cere where he said the ECB is ready to expand the QE pro­gram as need­ed and tthe ECB’s announce­ment on Dec 8 was basi­cal­ly a tem­po­rary com­pro­mise between the hawks and doves. But also note the oth­er con­text the ECB’s deci­sion to announce a cut in the QE while also announc­ing a 9 month exten­sion of the QE pro­gram instead of the expect­ed 6 month exten­sion: If the ECB had announced a 6 month exten­sion, that would set the QE pro­gram to expire in Sep­tem­ber 2017 instead of Decem­ber 2017. And what’s hap­pen­ing between Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber of 2017? Ger­many’s fed­er­al elec­tions in Octo­ber.

And it’s that con­text that rais­es the ques­tion of whether or not the ECB’s sur­prise deci­sions on Dec 8 to to cut asset pur­chas­es while extend­ing QE to the end of 2017 was basi­cal­ly all about try­ing to assuage ongo­ing Ger­man vot­er resis­tance to QE with a QE cut that looks like the start of a taper while also try­ing to avoid the need for the ECB to make a big new a pub­lic debate over what to do next debate with the QE. It would also help explain the deci­sion to find more bonds to pur­chase by low­er­ing the low­er lim­it on eli­gi­ble bond yields so the ECB can pur­chase more Ger­man bonds instead of oth­er options like drop­ping the “cap­i­tal key” which would have shift­ed the ECB’s focus away from a “QE that helpds every­one equal­ly” mod­el to a “QE that helps the coun­tries in need the most” mod­el.

Also don’t for­get that elec­tions in France and the Nether­lands are also sched­uled for next year and the far-right can­di­dates just might win in both cas­es. So, if euro­zone’s polit­i­cal zeit­gi­est goes hor­ri­bly awry next year, we could see the AfD surg­ing in Ger­many, Marine Le Pen win­ning in France, and Geert Wilder­s’s PVV dom­i­nat­ing the Nether­lands’ elec­tions in March. Giv­en all that, it prob­a­bly would­n’t be too supris­ing if the ECB decid­ed to start sig­nal­ing a QE taper sim­ply to take to some of the polit­i­cal heat off the ECB in each of these loom­ing elec­tions in coun­tries where the far-right is on the rise. In oth­er words, it’s pos­si­ble the ECB craft­ed its Dec 8 announc­ment for its 2017 QE specif­i­cal­ly min­i­mize the inevitable politi­ciza­tion of QE that’s guar­an­teed to take place next year. And yes, doing that would, itself, be an act of politi­ciza­tion, but it would be an act of pre­emp­tive politi­ciza­tion designed to reduce an expect­ed future politi­ciza­tion of the ECB.

So was all that part of the ECB’s under­ly­ing log­ic for its Decem­ber 8 QE deci­sion? It sure seems pos­si­ble, and if so, it also rais­es the ques­tion of just what the ECB would be doing if it was bas­ing its deci­sions sole­ly on the eco­nom­ics of the sit­u­a­tion. And while we don’t get to know how the ECB would have act­ed under a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment, also note that on the same day the ECB announced is extended/tapered QE plan, it also pro­vid­ed its for­cast for 2019. A fore­cast that once again pre­dicts that the ECB will miss its goal tar­get of hit­ting 2 per­cent infla­tion by 2019:

Reuters

ECB makes lit­tle change to growth and infla­tion fore­casts

Thu Dec 8, 2016 | 8:53am EST

The Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank left its eco­nom­ic growth and infla­tion fore­casts large­ly unchanged on Thurs­day, pre­dict­ing that price growth would raise slow­ly but again miss its tar­get of close to 2 per­cent in 2019.

The ECB slight­ly increased its 2017 growth fore­cast to 1.7 per­cent from 1.6 per­cent seen in Sep­tem­ber and lift­ed its 2017 infla­tion fore­cast to 1.3 per­cent from 1.2 per­cent pro­ject­ed three months ago, ECB Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi said at a news con­fer­ence.

In its ini­tial pro­jec­tions for 2019, the ECB put infla­tion at 1.7 per­cent, still below the tar­get it has under­shot for more than three years despite unprece­dent­ed stim­u­lus aimed at reviv­ing eco­nom­ic growth and boost­ing con­sumer prices.

...

“In its ini­tial pro­jec­tions for 2019, the ECB put infla­tion at 1.7 per­cent, still below the tar­get it has under­shot for more than three years despite unprece­dent­ed stim­u­lus aimed at reviv­ing eco­nom­ic growth and boost­ing con­sumer prices.”

Yes, for more than three years now, the ECB has failed to meet its 2 per­cent infla­tion tar­get and its pro­jec­tions for 2017–2019 con­tin­ue to under­shoot­ing that tar­get, fol­low­ing years of the ECB con­sis­tent­ly over­es­ti­mat­ing its infla­tion pro­jec­tions only to lat­er revise them low­er while mak­ing new over­ly opti­mistic expec­ta­tions. But despite this track record, it’s worth point­ing out what the ECB did accom­plish with its unprece­dent­ed mon­e­tary stim­u­lus: avoid­ing the kind of out­right defla­tion that would make the euro­zone’s cur­rent eco­nom­ic woes look like a pic­nic. That’s some­thing. It could be worse.

The Unof­fi­cial De Fac­to Por­tuguese Taper

Still, while avoid­ing a defla­tion­ary death spi­ral is indeed a pos­i­tive achieve­ment it’s not an ade­quate achieve­ment. The euro­zone is just one shock away from that same defla­tion­ary death spi­ral. So if we real­ly are see­ing the ECB “set­tle” for fail­ing its 2 per­cent infla­tion tar­get indef­i­nite­ly — and that’s the mes­sage the ECB is send­ing when it issues a qua­si-taper on the same day its 2019 infla­tion pro­jec­tions con­tin­ue to fail to meet its that tar­get — that’s rather omi­nous. And, unfor­tu­nate­ly, for Por­tu­gal, the ECB’s announced QE plans are already look­ing rather omi­nous:

Reuters

Por­tu­gal’s bor­row­ing costs move above cor­po­rates as ECB effect fades

* Por­tu­gal’s bor­row­ing costs move high­er than BB-rat­ed com­pa­nies
* QE changes favour short-dat­ed bonds from high­er-rat­ed coun­tries
* Pos­si­bil­i­ty of DBRS down­grade hangs “like sword of Damo­cles”

By Abhi­nav Ram­narayan
Tue Dec 20, 2016 | 8:41am EST

LONDON, Dec 20 Por­tu­gal’s bor­row­ing costs have risen above those of a group of sim­i­lar­ly-rat­ed Euro­pean com­pa­nies, on per­sis­tent con­cerns the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank will strug­gle to buy Por­tuguese gov­ern­ment bonds after changes to its asset-pur­chase pro­gramme.

Gov­ern­ments tend to enjoy bet­ter bor­row­ing rates than com­pa­nies with sim­i­lar cred­it rat­ings as gov­ern­ment cred­it is seen as the least risky. All oth­er bor­row­ers pay a pre­mi­um.

This effect has been exac­er­bat­ed by the ECB’s bond-buy­ing scheme, launched in March 2015 and focused on gov­ern­ment debt. But last week the ECB made changes to the scheme that ana­lysts said would see pur­chas­es con­cen­trat­ed on high­ly-rat­ed bonds.

This graph­ic tmsnrt.rs/2hVdYBl shows how over 2016 the yield on Por­tu­gal’s 10-year gov­ern­ment bond has, unusu­al­ly, risen above the yield on an index of Euro­pean cor­po­rates with the same rat­ing as the sov­er­eign.

Por­tu­gal 10-year bond, rat­ed Ba1/BB+/BB+ by the three main rat­ings agen­cies, is now 13 basis points (bps) above the Reuters index of 10-year dou­ble-B-rat­ed Euro­pean cor­po­rate bonds .

By com­par­i­son, Spain’s 10-year gov­ern­ment bond — rat­ed BBB — yields 25 bps less than an index of triple B‑rated bonds and A‑rated Ire­land’s 10-year bond yields 43 bps less than the single‑A index.

The ECB also buys invest­ment-grade cor­po­rate bonds under its asset-pur­chase scheme, albeit in much small­er vol­umes.

Por­tu­gal is also rat­ed BBB (low) by DBRS, the only agency to make the sov­er­eign invest­ment grade. It main­tained the rat­ing in Octo­ber.

“To me (the rever­sal) shows that the ECB sup­port for Por­tu­gal is no longer the same and it is now trad­ing more accord­ing to its rat­ing,” said Com­merzbank strate­gist David Sch­nautz.

“The changes to the ECB’s bond-buy­ing pro­gramme leave Por­tu­gal hang­ing because they don’t address the spe­cif­ic prob­lems Por­tu­gal faces in terms of QE eli­gi­bil­i­ty,” he said.

Last week’s changes will allow the ECB to buy bonds with matu­ri­ties of less than two years and bonds yield­ing less than the deposit rate.

Both changes imply the ECB will con­cen­trate its pur­chas­es on high­er-rat­ed coun­tries and not on the likes of Por­tu­gal, which has a lim­it­ed amount of short-dat­ed debt and no bonds yield­ing less than the minus 40 basis point deposit rate.

...

“This effect has been exac­er­bat­ed by the ECB’s bond-buy­ing scheme, launched in March 2015 and focused on gov­ern­ment debt. But last week the ECB made changes to the scheme that ana­lysts said would see pur­chas­es con­cen­trat­ed on high­ly-rat­ed bonds.

So despite the fact that Por­tu­gal and Ire­land were already devi­at­ing from the QE “cap­i­tal key” rule and buy­ing few­er bonds than their the cap­i­tal key war­rant­ed due to con­cerns over the QE 33 per­cent cap rule, the ECB decid­ed to low­er the min­i­mum yields on QE-pur­chased bond (so it could buy more Ger­man bonds with­out break­ing the cap­i­tal key for Ger­many) and not drop the cap­i­tal keys or the 33 per­cent cap to make more of Por­tu­gal’s bonds avail­able. And as ana­lysts observe, this all indi­cates that the ECB is going to be con­cen­trat­ing its QE bond pur­chas­es on high­ly-rat­ed bonds even though the whole point of some like QE is to shore up weak­er bond mar­kets and give them time and room to heal:

...
Por­tu­gal is also rat­ed BBB (low) by DBRS, the only agency to make the sov­er­eign invest­ment grade. It main­tained the rat­ing in Octo­ber.

“To me (the rever­sal) shows that the ECB sup­port for Por­tu­gal is no longer the same and it is now trad­ing more accord­ing to its rat­ing,” said Com­merzbank strate­gist David Sch­nautz.

“The changes to the ECB’s bond-buy­ing pro­gramme leave Por­tu­gal hang­ing because they don’t address the spe­cif­ic prob­lems Por­tu­gal faces in terms of QE eli­gi­bil­i­ty,” he said.

Last week’s changes will allow the ECB to buy bonds with matu­ri­ties of less than two years and bonds yield­ing less than the deposit rate.

Both changes imply the ECB will con­cen­trate its pur­chas­es on high­er-rat­ed coun­tries and not on the likes of Por­tu­gal, which has a lim­it­ed amount of short-dat­ed debt and no bonds yield­ing less than the minus 40 basis point deposit rate.
...

Both changes imply the ECB will con­cen­trate its pur­chas­es on high­er-rat­ed coun­tries and not on the likes of Por­tu­gal, which has a lim­it­ed amount of short-dat­ed debt and no bonds yield­ing less than the minus 40 basis point deposit rate.”

So the ECB’s lat­est QE changes appear to be ori­ent­ed to allow­ing it to buy more Ger­man bonds and less Por­tugese bonds. And absolute­ly noth­ing was done about the issue of Por­tu­gal approach­ing that 33 per­cent cap. In oth­er words, the ECB’s deci­sion to ori­ent its bond pur­chas­es away from Por­tu­gal is very much aligned with its deci­sion to do noth­ing about that 33 cap: while it’s unclear if the over­all QE pro­gram is about to under­go a taper, it’s more more clear for Por­tu­gal: Por­tu­gal’s QE par­tic­i­pa­tion is get­ting tapered one way or anoth­er.

All in all, whether or not the ECB is start­ing a QE taper for real or just for the­atrics to pla­cate anx­ious elec­torates, the motive for that move prob­a­bly has a lot more to do with the euro­zone’s polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances vs the macro­eco­nom­ic need for more QE. And if that is the case and there real­ly is con­cern at the ECB that its QE pro­grams could become focal point for anti-euro­zone par­ti­san ire in the upcom­ing elec­tions, per­haps it would be worth point­ing out to those angry elec­torates, espe­cial­ly the elec­torate in Ger­many, that the rules the ECB pre­vi­ous­ly put in place to ensure that QE would­n’t help one coun­try more than anoth­er (like the “cap­i­tal keys” and “no more than 33 per­cent of a nation’s sov­er­eign bonds can be held by the ECB” rules) has result­ed in a sit­u­a­tion where the coun­tries most in need of QE sup­port get the least. And vice ver­sa:

The Wall Street Jour­nal

ECB’s New Dilem­ma: Need­i­est Nations Receive Less Stim­u­lus
Part­ly due to bank’s rules, its bond-buy­ing has under­shot Por­tu­gal and Ire­land

By Jon Sin­dreu
Dec. 19, 2016 6:00 a.m. ET

When it extend­ed its bond-pur­chase pro­gram this month, the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank need­ed to choose between buy­ing bonds at extreme­ly neg­a­tive returns or gear­ing stim­u­lus toward euro­zone nations that need it the most.

It chose the for­mer.

Every move by pol­i­cy mak­ers in the sin­gle-cur­ren­cy euro­zone is sup­posed to avoid ben­e­fit­ing some nations over oth­ers. But now, due in part to the design of ECB rules, more stim­u­lus is deliv­ered to the health­i­est economies and less to those that are lag­ging behind.

This month, ECB Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi said the bank would extend the cen­tral bank’s asset-pur­chase pro­gram from its pro­ject­ed March end date until Decem­ber 2017. This change has forced offi­cials to relax the rules guid­ing the pro­gram to avoid run­ning out of eli­gi­ble bonds to buy.

The cen­tral bank has been man­dat­ed to spread its pur­chas­es accord­ing to how much cap­i­tal each coun­try has at the ECB. Keep­ing this quo­ta intact has been a goal for politi­cians in North­ern Europe, chiefly Ger­many, as it helps ensure coun­tries don’t have to share the debt bur­dens of oth­ers through the cen­tral bank.

How­ev­er, the ECB already bought debt of the eurozone’s most dis­tressed nations under an emer­gency pro­gram from 2010 to 2012 and is now hav­ing to buy less from these coun­tries than nation­al quo­tas would dic­tate.

This is because the ECB had two oth­er main self-imposed rules con­strain­ing its actions. First, it isn’t allowed to own more than one-third of a sin­gle issuer’s out­stand­ing debt. Sec­ond, it couldn’t buy bonds with yields below its own deposit-facil­i­ty rate, cur­rent­ly at minus 0.4%.

As a result, since it expand­ed bond buy­ing in March, the ECB has under­shot Por­tuguese bond pur­chas­es by well over €3 bil­lion ($3.1 bil­lion) and over­shot pur­chas­es in Ger­many by €8 bil­lion.

...

The aim of the bond-buy­ing pro­gram is to help the econ­o­my by low­er­ing bor­row­ing costs fur­ther, and Por­tu­gal clear­ly needs it more: Its 10-year gov­ern­ment yield is almost at 4%, sec­ond only to that of Greece, reflect­ing a founder­ing econ­o­my. In Ger­many, a coun­try at full employ­ment, the 10-year yield is close to 0.3%.

But the cen­tral bank’s deci­sions this month did lit­tle to address con­cerns that it will keep under­shoot­ing pur­chas­es in the need­i­est nations.

“We don’t think the ECB announce­ment is good for the periph­ery,” said Bert Louren­co, head of rates strat­e­gy for Europe, Mid­dle East and Asia at British lender HSBC Hold­ings PLC.

To expand the pool of eli­gi­ble assets, offi­cials chose to remove the pro­hi­bi­tion to buy bonds below the minus‑0.4% deposit rate, which will allow the ECB to buy more Ger­man and Dutch bonds. They didn’t touch any of the main obsta­cles that are dri­ving the cen­tral bank to buy less in Por­tu­gal and Ire­land.

The rea­son, Mr. Draghi said, is that “there was an increas­ing aware­ness of the legal and insti­tu­tion­al con­straints that would make such a change dif­fi­cult.”

The deci­sion isn’t pain­less for Ger­many, either. When the ECB buys a bond yield­ing, for exam­ple, minus‑0.5%, it does so by cre­at­ing a deposit in its own accounts. If the rate it pays on this deposit is minus‑0.4%, it means it is get­ting less from the bond than it is pay­ing, expos­ing itself to loss­es.

In real­i­ty, nation­al cen­tral banks do most of the pur­chas­es at the ECB’s behest, and yields are only neg­a­tive in the safest euro­zone nations. In Ger­many, all bonds up to five years of matu­ri­ty return less than minus‑0.4%. This means that remov­ing this rule will hurt, most of all, the Ger­man Bundesbank’s prof­its.

Still, “the Ger­mans pre­fer to take the heat on their own pur­chas­es than to relax con­straints on the periph­ery,” said François Savary, chief investor at Gene­va-based advi­so­ry firm Prime Part­ners. “It’s a polit­i­cal choice.”

To be sure, these bonds may still prove prof­itable if rates go low­er in the future. And even if some spe­cif­ic bonds gen­er­ate paper loss­es, over­all pur­chas­es are unlike­ly to.

Also, the stim­u­lus ide­al­ly reach­es beyond bor­ders. Ger­mans, for exam­ple, may use low­er bor­row­ing costs to import more prod­ucts from Por­tu­gal.

But some investors see the inflex­i­bil­i­ty of the rules as anoth­er con­cern­ing sign of the polit­i­cal strug­gle of the euro­zone to stay togeth­er.

While prof­its and loss­es don’t the­o­ret­i­cal­ly mean much to cen­tral banks, they often do in prac­tice.

Bun­des­bank Pres­i­dent Jens Wei­d­mann spoke against the removal of the deposit floor ear­li­er in the year, while Ger­man economists—like Hans-Wern­er Sinn, pres­i­dent of the Ifo Insti­tute for Eco­nom­ic Research—have often sug­gest­ed all of the ECB’s actions end up hid­ing under-the-table bailouts for south­ern Euro­pean coun­tries.

Any step toward aim­ing mon­e­tary pol­i­cy at the need­i­est coun­tries has long been polit­i­cal­ly con­tro­ver­sial and chal­lenged in Ger­man and Euro­pean courts. Some fear these con­straints on the ECB could impair its abil­i­ty to deliv­er more stim­u­lus.

“Polit­i­cal con­straints appear to now be dom­i­nat­ing,” Bank of Amer­i­ca Mer­rill Lynch told its clients last week. “Come anoth­er large shock, the cen­tral bank would have lit­tle ammu­ni­tion left.”

“Every move by pol­i­cy mak­ers in the sin­gle-cur­ren­cy euro­zone is sup­posed to avoid ben­e­fit­ing some nations over oth­ers. But now, due in part to the design of ECB rules, more stim­u­lus is deliv­ered to the health­i­est economies and less to those that are lag­ging behind.

And that’s where we are with the ECB’s QE: the health­i­est economies get the great­est ben­e­fit while the coun­tries that most need that QE stim­u­lus are get­ting slow­ing pushed out of the pro­gram:

...
This month, ECB Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi said the bank would extend the cen­tral bank’s asset-pur­chase pro­gram from its pro­ject­ed March end date until Decem­ber 2017. This change has forced offi­cials to relax the rules guid­ing the pro­gram to avoid run­ning out of eli­gi­ble bonds to buy.

The cen­tral bank has been man­dat­ed to spread its pur­chas­es accord­ing to how much cap­i­tal each coun­try has at the ECB. Keep­ing this quo­ta intact has been a goal for politi­cians in North­ern Europe, chiefly Ger­many, as it helps ensure coun­tries don’t have to share the debt bur­dens of oth­ers through the cen­tral bank.

How­ev­er, the ECB already bought debt of the eurozone’s most dis­tressed nations under an emer­gency pro­gram from 2010 to 2012 and is now hav­ing to buy less from these coun­tries than nation­al quo­tas would dic­tate.

This is because the ECB had two oth­er main self-imposed rules con­strain­ing its actions. First, it isn’t allowed to own more than one-third of a sin­gle issuer’s out­stand­ing debt. Sec­ond, it couldn’t buy bonds with yields below its own deposit-facil­i­ty rate, cur­rent­ly at minus 0.4%.

As a result, since it expand­ed bond buy­ing in March, the ECB has under­shot Por­tuguese bond pur­chas­es by well over €3 bil­lion ($3.1 bil­lion) and over­shot pur­chas­es in Ger­many by €8 bil­lion.
...

“As a result, since it expand­ed bond buy­ing in March, the ECB has under­shot Por­tuguese bond pur­chas­es by well over €3 bil­lion ($3.1 bil­lion) and over­shot pur­chas­es in Ger­many by €8 bil­lion.”

That’s the sit­u­a­tion: Thanks to all the self-imposed rules the ECB put in place in order to avoid any pos­si­bil­i­ty that the QE pro­gram could end up help­ing one euro­zone coun­try more than anoth­er, large­ly at the behest of the euro­zone’s wealth­i­er mem­bers like Ger­many and the Nether­lands, the ECB’s QE is now more of a stim­u­lus pro­gram for Ger­many than coun­tries the like Por­tu­gal that actu­al­ly need it. Will that lit­tle fun-fact end up pen­e­trat­ing the far-right “pop­ulist” fer­vor bound to dom­i­nate the polit­i­cal scene in next year’s crit­i­cal euro­zone elec­tions? Prob­a­bly not, but it should.

Discussion

7 comments for “The New World Ordoliberalism Part 6: The QE Taper Caper and the Portuguese Squeeze”

  1. Here’s an arti­cle with a head­line that we’re prob­a­bly going to see a lot more in com­ings months: “ECB slash­es pur­chas­es of Por­tuguese debt as lim­it looms”:

    Reuters

    UPDATE 1‑ECB slash­es pur­chas­es of Por­tuguese debt as lim­it looms

    * ECB buys 40 pct few­er Por­tuguese bonds than rules dic­tate

    * Por­tuguese infla­tion still low, out­look uncer­tain

    * Frank­furt wary of hit­ting issuer lim­it (Recasts, adds detail)

    By Francesco Canepa
    Tue Jan 3, 2017 | 11:57am EST

    FRANKFURT, Jan 3 The Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank bought far few­er Por­tuguese gov­ern­ment bonds last month than its rules dic­tate, reduc­ing its sup­port for a coun­try where gov­ern­ment bor­row­ing costs are ris­ing and the eco­nom­ic out­look is uncer­tain.

    ...

    With its bond-buy­ing scheme set to con­tin­ue at least until Decem­ber, the ECB has slowed down month­ly pur­chas­es in Por­tu­gal to avoid hit­ting a lim­it on how much of the coun­try’s debt it can own.

    The reduc­tion in ECB pur­chas­es has nev­er been as marked as in Decem­ber, when the ECB bought 726 mil­lion euros worth — 40 per­cent less than it should have accord­ing to its own rules.

    This reduced sup­port has already tak­en a toll on Por­tu­gal, where gov­ern­ment bor­row­ing costs rose last year for the first time since 2011.

    At the start of its pro­gramme, the ECB said it would buy gov­ern­ment bonds accord­ing to how much of the ECB’s own cap­i­tal each coun­try had paid.

    On this mea­sure, Por­tu­gal should account for around 2.5 per­cent of all euro zone gov­ern­ment bonds bought by euro zone cen­tral banks, but they only made up 1.5 per­cent of the total in Decem­ber.

    Pur­chas­es of Irish bonds were also short of that coun­try’s share of the cap­i­tal key last month, albeit to a less­er extent.

    The ECB is already near­ing a self-imposed lim­it of hold­ing a third of both coun­tries’ debt due to the large amounts of bonds it bought under pre­vi­ous cri­sis-fight­ing mea­sures.

    If it touch­es that lim­it, it would have to stop buy­ing Por­tuguese bonds alto­geth­er. That would like­ly have severe con­se­quences on the Por­tuguese gov­ern­men­t’s bor­row­ing costs and its abil­i­ty to spend.

    “The reduc­tion in ECB pur­chas­es has nev­er been as marked as in Decem­ber, when the ECB bought 726 mil­lion euros worth — 40 per­cent less than it should have accord­ing to its own rules.”

    Keep in mind that as Por­tu­gal creeps clos­er and clos­er to the 33 per­cent cap
    each month these QE cuts are only going to grow. And yes, that means the ECB’s QE pro­gram is now basi­cal­ly pulling sup­port from one of its weak­est economies just as its frag­ile recov­ery is get­ting under­way. And it’s all being done in the name of “fair­ness” and “play­ing by the rules” or what­ev­er par­tic­u­lar ratio­nal the euro­zone finance min­is­ters used to jus­ti­fy their deci­sion in ear­ly Decem­ber to tweak the rules to allow more Ger­man bond pur­chas­es over more Por­tuguese and Irish pur­chas­es (and maybe pos­si­bly Greek pur­chas­es if the Troi­ka allows Greece to leave its “bailout” sta­tus).

    Although it’s worth not­ing that there is talk of a pos­si­ble plan that could help the Irish get around their own 33 per­cent ceil­ing. Sort of. The plan would­n’t elim­i­nate the reduced ECB pur­chas­es of Irish bonds but it would at least lim­it the scale of the reduc­tion: Before the Decem­ber 8th meet­ing last month, the ECB was esti­mat­ed to hold ~31 bil­lion in Irish bonds, which is at 97 per­cent of that 33 cap. One way to address this is for Ire­land to sim­ply issue more bonds, thus increas­ing the total size of the Irish bond mar­ket and push­ing up the avail­able cap. The plan right now is to hope­ful­ly issue 13 bil­lion euros in new bonds, which should add anoth­er 4.25 bil­lion euros to that 33 per­cent cap.

    A sec­ond way to address the cap has to be much more embit­ter­ing for Ire­land: It has to do with the fact that The ECB is still hold­ing bil­lions of euros in bonds in the Anglo Irish, the large Irish bank that implod­ed that was heav­i­ly involved in financ­ing Ire­land’s hous­ing bub­ble (with the immense help of for­eign lenders) and was nation­al­ized in 2009 when that bub­ble burst, large­ly as a bailout to for­eign (heav­i­ly French and Ger­man) lenders. And that nation­al­iza­tion of pri­vate (for­eign lender) debt, in turn, sent Ire­land itself into a down­ward spi­ral lead­ing to the “bailout” of Ire­land in 2010. And all the aus­ter­i­ty that fol­lowed. The more of those Anglo Irish bonds the ECB takes off its books the more Irish bonds it can buy with the QE pro­gram.

    So if Ire­land issues as much new debt as pos­si­ble and the ECB sells as many Anglo Irish bonds as its sched­uled to sell, Ire­land might be able to turn a project 50 per­cent reduc­tion to maybe just a 30 per­cent reduc­tion in ECB pur­chas­es of Irish bonds in its QE pro­gram. And most of those Anglo Irish bonds are get­ting sold back to Ire­land as is. As long as Ire­land keeps buy­ing a bunch of Anglo Irish bonds it might be able to blunt the reduc­tion in its QE par­tic­i­pa­tion. Whoop­ie:

    The Irish Times

    ECB Irish bond restric­tions may be eased by NTMA, Cen­tral Bank
    ECB like­ly to be able to lim­it fall-off in Irish bond pur­chas­es to less than 30 per cent

    Joe Bren­nan
    Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 06:08

    The Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank will be able to buy more Irish bonds than feared next year, if the State’s debt agency issues the max­i­mum €13 bil­lion of bonds it has tar­get­ed for 2017 and the Cen­tral Bank keeps sell­ing bonds linked to Anglo Irish Bank’s bailout at pace.

    Econ­o­mists were sur­prised on Decem­ber 8th when the ECB extend­ed the lifes­pan of its huge stim­u­lus pro­gramme to the end of next year, but failed to ease the terms attached to it. These terms restrict­ed the ECB to buy­ing no more than 33 per cent of eli­gi­ble bonds from a sin­gle state and 33 per cent of any indi­vid­ual bond in issue, which put Ire­land and Por­tu­gal at an imme­di­ate dis­ad­van­tage to oth­er euro zone coun­tries.

    Before the ECB meet­ing, Can­tor Fitzgerald’s head of fixed-income strat­e­gy in Dublin, Ryan McGrath, esti­mat­ed that euro zone cen­tral banks held about €31.34 bil­lion of eli­gi­ble Irish bonds under the quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing plan. That equat­ed to over 97 per cent of the max­i­mum amount Mr McGrath esti­mat­ed the ECB could buy, based on the strict con­di­tions attached to the pro­gramme.

    Sources said, after the ECB gov­ern­ing coun­cil meet­ing, that even with fur­ther planned gov­ern­ment debt sales and oth­er actions next year, the amount of Irish bonds acquired each month by the ECB would be like­ly to drop by about 50 per cent to €400 mil­lion a month.

    How­ev­er, mar­ket sources said on Thurs­day it is like­ly the ECB, through the Cen­tral Bank in Dublin, will be able lim­it the fall-off in Irish bond pur­chas­es next year to less than 30 per cent.

    NTMA

    That’s part­ly based on the Nation­al Trea­sury Man­age­ment Agency sell­ing the max­i­mum €13 bil­lion of bond sales it has tar­get­ed for next year, which the debt agency announced last week.

    It also assumes the Cen­tral Bank keeps up the pace of sell­ing off bonds relat­ing to the bailout of Anglo Irish Bank.

    The secu­ri­ties are the result of the Cen­tral Bank receiv­ing €25 bil­lion of gov­ern­ment bonds in 2013 under a com­plex restruc­tur­ing of promis­so­ry notes used by the State dur­ing the cri­sis to res­cue the bank.

    ...

    The Cen­tral Bank sold €3 bil­lion of these bonds to the NTMA this year, includ­ing a €500 mil­lion tranche on Thurs­day. Last year, the NTMA bought €2 billion’s worth of such bonds from the Cen­tral Bank.

    “Before the ECB meet­ing, Can­tor Fitzgerald’s head of fixed-income strat­e­gy in Dublin, Ryan McGrath, esti­mat­ed that euro zone cen­tral banks held about €31.34 bil­lion of eli­gi­ble Irish bonds under the quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing plan. That equat­ed to over 97 per cent of the max­i­mum amount Mr McGrath esti­mat­ed the ECB could buy, based on the strict con­di­tions attached to the pro­gramme.”

    That’s how close Ire­land is to its 33 per­cent cap: it’s already 97 per­cent of the way there. If it issues the max­i­mum of 13 bil­lion euros in new debt in 2017 that will free up anoth­er 4.25 bil­lion for QE pur­chas­es. But if it’s going to raise that cap more, it’s going to have to buy more of those Anglo Irish bonds first. It bought 3 bil­lion euros in bonds in 2016 last year, 2 bil­lion in 2015, and we’ll find out what it buys in 2017 but it will prob­a­bly be a lot. And when we do find that out we’ll also find out what the ECB’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in Ire­land’s QE will be. The QE that’s sup­posed to help coun­tries like Ire­land.

    So Ire­land basi­cal­ly has to bor­row to buy back the Anglo Irish bonds — bonds which were pri­vate­ly held until Ire­land nation­al­ize the bank to bail out Anglo Irish’s for­eign (most­ly French and Ger­man) cred­i­tors and which caused Ire­land’s years of aus­ter­i­ty — in order to avoid see­ing its par­tic­i­pa­tion in the QE pro­gram grind­ing to a halt.

    Usury can get pret­ty con­vo­lut­ed at times. Espe­cial­ly at the nation state lev­el.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 3, 2017, 8:09 pm
  2. Here’s a sign of hope for the euro­zone’s future, although it comes in the form of a warn­ing about the euro­zone’s pos­si­ble doom from Sig­mar Gabriel, the like­ly choice of the SPD to face off against Merkel in this year’s elec­tions, so it’s not super hope­ful. Still, it’s nice to see sane warn­ings of doom from Ger­many’s politi­cians. You’ve got to take hope where you can find it when doom looms:

    Reuters

    Ger­many’s Gabriel says EU break-up no longer unthink­able
    Sat Jan 7, 2017 | 10:21am EST

    Ger­many’s insis­tence on aus­ter­i­ty in the euro zone has left Europe more divid­ed than ever and a break-up of the Euro­pean Union is no longer incon­ceiv­able, Ger­man Vice Chan­cel­lor Sig­mar Gabriel told Der Spiegel mag­a­zine.

    ...

    “I once asked the chan­cel­lor, what would be more cost­ly for Ger­many: for France to be allowed to have half a per­cent­age point more deficit, or for Marine Le Pen to become pres­i­dent?” he said, refer­ring to the leader of the far-right Nation­al Front.

    “Until today, she still owes me an answer,” added Gabriel, whose SPD favors a greater focus on invest­ment while Merkel’s con­ser­v­a­tives put more empha­sis on fis­cal dis­ci­pline as a foun­da­tion for eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty.

    The SPD is expect­ed to choose Gabriel, their long-stand­ing chair­man who is also econ­o­my min­is­ter, to run against Merkel for chan­cel­lor in Sep­tem­ber’s fed­er­al elec­tion, senior par­ty sources said on Thurs­day.

    Asked if he real­ly believed he could win more votes by trans­fer­ring more Ger­man mon­ey to oth­er EU coun­tries, Gabriel replied: “I know that this dis­cus­sion is extreme­ly unpop­u­lar.”

    “But I also know about the state of the EU. It is no longer unthink­able that it breaks apart,” he said in the inter­view, pub­lished on Sat­ur­day.

    “Should that hap­pen, our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren would curse us,” he added. “Because Ger­many is the biggest ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the Euro­pean com­mu­ni­ty — eco­nom­i­cal­ly and polit­i­cal­ly.”

    “Asked if he real­ly believed he could win more votes by trans­fer­ring more Ger­man mon­ey to oth­er EU coun­tries, Gabriel replied: “I know that this dis­cus­sion is extreme­ly unpop­u­lar.””

    Well, with the SPD’s like­ly can­di­date for Chan­cel­lor talk­ing about the need fis­cal trans­fers and warn against the dan­gers of aus­ter­i­ty, maybe the euro­zone isn’t entire­ly doomed. It’s still not the best sign since no one is expect­ing the SPD to defeat the CDU. Although it’s pos­si­ble we could see the SPD come out head if the far-right surges and the AfD does much bet­ter than expect­ed by steal­ing away the CDU’s votes. Of course, that’s still an awful sce­nario. And if both Merkel and the AfD cam­paign in favor of more aus­ter­i­ty and against the ECB’s QE and end up trounc­ing the SPD, things could be extra bad.

    So while it is indeed a sign of hope that Sig­mar Gabriel is sig­nal­ing that he’ll push an anti-aus­ter­i­ty theme in his like­ly cam­paign against Merkel this year, it’s a sign of hope in the form of an hon­est warn­ing about loom­ing doom. It’s not super hope­ful.

    Of course, since polit­i­cal­ly unpalat­able things like fis­cal trans­fers from rich to poor coun­tries are prob­a­bly both nec­es­sary for the euro­zone to func­tion and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble to get the pop­u­lace to agree to, it’s not entire­ly clear that the euro­zone real­ly can real­is­ti­cal­ly ever achieve the polit­i­cal zeit­geist required for it to func­tion eco­nom­i­cal­ly and, in turn, func­tion polit­i­cal­ly. So it’s not real­ly clear­ly that it’s in any­one’s best inter­ests for the euro­zone to con­tin­ue at all in the long-run, in which case those warn­ings from Gabriel of the euro­zone’s pos­si­ble doom are also signs of hope in the sense that the euro­zone’s doom is itself a hope­ful event.

    All in all, there’s no short­age of hope­ful doom loom­ing over the Europe in 2017. There’s no short­age of doom­ful doom either.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 8, 2017, 11:38 pm
  3. Oh great. Guess which euro­zone mem­ber just expe­ri­enced a “surge” in infla­tion. A “surge” all the way up to 1.7 per­cent. Thanks almost entire­ly to ris­ing oil prices:

    Bloomberg

    Ger­man Infla­tion Jumps to Fastest Since 2013 on Oil Prices

    by Piotr Skolimows­ki

    Jan­u­ary 3, 2017, 7:00 AM CST Jan­u­ary 3, 2017, 7:57 AM CST

    * Con­sumer prices rose annu­al 1.7% this month vs 1.3% esti­mate
    * Euro-area infla­tion report due to be pub­lished on Wednes­day

    The pace of Ger­man infla­tion more than dou­bled in Decem­ber, dri­ven by a surge in oil that is set to mask con­tin­ued weak­ness in under­ly­ing price pres­sures in the months ahead.

    Con­sumer prices rose 1.7 per­cent from a year ago, record­ing the biggest jump on record, the Fed­er­al Sta­tis­tics Office in Wies­baden said on Tues­day. Econ­o­mists sur­veyed by Bloomberg pre­dict­ed an increase to 1.3 per­cent. The read­ing is the strongest since July 2013 and fol­lows a rate of 0.7 per­cent the pre­vi­ous month. Prices rose 1 per­cent from Novem­ber.

    The increase takes infla­tion in the region’s largest econ­o­my close to the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank’s def­i­n­i­tion of price sta­bil­i­ty of just under 2 per­cent, pro­vid­ing ammu­ni­tion for some offi­cials push­ing for a grad­ual exit from uncon­ven­tion­al stim­u­lus. Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi has argued that a deci­sion last month to extend bond buy­ing for longer than antic­i­pat­ed but at a slow­er pace reflect­ed a “firm­ing” euro-area recov­ery and “still sub­dued” core price gains.

    “The key ques­tion will be by how much high­er ener­gy prices will feed into oth­er prices,” said Hol­ger Sandte, chief Euro­pean ana­lyst at Nordea Mar­kets in Copen­hagen. With the main dri­ver of the Decem­ber pick­up a base effect from past oil-price declines, “we expect a very grad­ual increase in core infla­tion both for Ger­many and the euro area.”

    The euro was lit­tle changed after the report and trad­ed at $1.0389 at 2:57 p.m. Frank­furt time.

    The cost of Brent crude surged 12.6 per­cent in Decem­ber, record­ing the biggest month­ly increase since April. Prices are set to rise fur­ther as the Orga­ni­za­tion of Petro­le­um Export­ing Coun­tries and 11 oth­er nations start­ed to cut out­put on Jan. 1 in an effort to reduce bloat­ed glob­al inven­to­ries.

    Ener­gy Prices

    Prices for heat­ing oil in Ger­many rose annu­al­ly for the first time in four years in Decem­ber. Most states report­ed increas­es of more than 20 per­cent, con­tribut­ing as much as 0.3 per­cent­age point to infla­tion rates.

    Fuel was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly more expen­sive, with year-over-year price gains exceed­ing 5 per­cent in all region­al reports pub­lished Tues­day. Food prices jumped at least 3 per­cent in the major­i­ty of states.

    In France, con­sumer prices increased 0.8 per­cent in Decem­ber from a year ear­li­er, the most since May 2014, accord­ing to a sep­a­rate report. Span­ish infla­tion accel­er­at­ed to 1.4 per­cent, the high­est rate since mid-2013.

    ...

    “The increase takes infla­tion in the region’s largest econ­o­my close to the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank’s def­i­n­i­tion of price sta­bil­i­ty of just under 2 per­cent, pro­vid­ing ammu­ni­tion for some offi­cials push­ing for a grad­ual exit from uncon­ven­tion­al stim­u­lus. Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi has argued that a deci­sion last month to extend bond buy­ing for longer than antic­i­pat­ed but at a slow­er pace reflect­ed a “firm­ing” euro-area recov­ery and “still sub­dued” core price gains.”

    So Ger­many expe­ri­ences an oil-induced one month surge in infla­tion due large­ly to a surge in oil prices, bring­ing Ger­man infla­tion all the way up to whole 1.7 per­cent.

    And what hap­pened next? A clam­or in Berlin for an end to the ECB’s QE and a hike in rates, of course:

    The Finan­cial Times

    Soar­ing euro­zone infla­tion presents ECB with dilem­ma

    Increase to 1.1% revives rate rise calls but ana­lysts say region’s econ­o­my still weak

    Jan­u­ary 4, 2017

    by: Claire Jones in Frank­furt

    Surg­ing euro­zone infla­tion looks set to leave the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank caught between appeas­ing Ger­man advo­cates of high­er inter­est rates and assur­ing fear­ful investors that it has no plans to fur­ther trim its bond pur­chas­es just yet.

    Annu­al infla­tion in the sin­gle cur­ren­cy area has soared to its high­est lev­el since 2013, climb­ing to 1.1 per cent in Decem­ber, accord­ing to data released by Euro­stat, the Euro­pean Commission’s sta­tis­tics bureau, on Wednes­day.

    While the year-on-year read­ing, the first above 1 per cent since Sep­tem­ber 2013, has revived Berlin’s calls for rate ris­es, mar­ket ana­lysts say the euro­zone econ­o­my is still weak and the bank must press on with plans to buy bonds worth €780bn this year under its land­mark quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing pro­gramme.

    Politi­cians in the eurozone’s strongest econ­o­my were quick to use high­er infla­tion, which in Ger­many is now 1.7 per cent, to ramp up pres­sure on the ECB to aban­don the low inter­est rate pol­i­cy they say is rob­bing cit­i­zens of their sav­ings.

    Han­dels­blatt, the busi­ness dai­ly, on Wednes­day led its front page with the head­line: “Trapped by Low Inter­est Rates.”

    Speak­ing to the Finan­cial Times, Wolf­gang Steiger, gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the eco­nom­ic coun­cil of Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s CDU par­ty, said: “The alleged spec­tre of defla­tion can no longer serve as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for mon­e­tary policy’s dop­ing effects [on the euro­zone econ­o­my].

    “For the saver, the com­bi­na­tion of ris­ing infla­tion and zero rates is a dra­mat­ic destruc­tion of the val­ue of their mon­ey. It is all the more urgent that the race towards ever more uncon­ven­tion­al cen­tral bank actions is final­ly stopped.”

    Alexan­der Rad­wan, a mem­ber of the CDU’s sis­ter par­ty, the CSU, said: “The exit from the zero-inter­est rate pol­i­cy is dif­fi­cult and lengthy...That is why we must begin now.”

    The calls from Ger­many are like­ly to grow loud­er as the head­line infla­tion rate ticks up in the com­ing months. With the coun­try head­ing to the polls lat­er this year, crit­i­cism of the ECB is one way to win favour with an elec­torate that has become more Euroscep­tic.

    ...

    Despite the head­line num­ber climb­ing sharply from November’s 0.6 per cent, core infla­tion, which strips out volatile ener­gy and food prices, inched up only slight­ly to 0.9 per cent in Decem­ber from 0.8 per cent.

    ...

    “The calls from Ger­many are like­ly to grow loud­er as the head­line infla­tion rate ticks up in the com­ing months. With the coun­try head­ing to the polls lat­er this year, crit­i­cism of the ECB is one way to win favour with an elec­torate that has become more Euroscep­tic.”

    As we can see, slam­ming the ECB’s efforts to hold the euro­zone togeth­er and demand­ing an imme­di­ate rates hikes and an end to QE all to pro­tect savers — savers who appar­ent­ly don’t care if there’s anoth­er euro­zone cri­sis — is going to be one of the meth­ods of choice for Ger­man politi­cians run­ning the Ger­man ver­sion of a Trumpian cam­paign in 2017:

    ...
    Speak­ing to the Finan­cial Times, Wolf­gang Steiger, gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the eco­nom­ic coun­cil of Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s CDU par­ty, said: “The alleged spec­tre of defla­tion can no longer serve as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for mon­e­tary policy’s dop­ing effects [on the euro­zone econ­o­my].
    ...

    Yes, the threat of defla­tion for the euro­zone as a whole is mere­ly an “alleged spec­tre” now that Ger­many, the euro­zone’s strongest econ­o­my, man­aged to expe­ri­ence a one-month oil-spike-induced rise in infla­tion to a lev­el that’s still below the ECB’s 2 per­cent tar­get. And despite the fact that the rest of the euro­zone’s core infla­tion rate is up a whole 0.3 per­cent above its all time low:

    Bloomberg Mar­kets

    Why It’s Too Soon for Draghi to Cel­e­brate the Return of Infla­tion

    by Car­olynn Look
    and Fer­gal O’Brien
    Jan­u­ary 4, 2017, 4:00 AM CST Jan­u­ary 4, 2017, 8:26 AM CST

    * Con­sumer prices rise 1.1%, core infla­tion increas­es to 0.9%
    * Ger­many sur­prised with record infla­tion surge on Tues­day

    The euro area’s defla­tion scare has abat­ed, but it may not yet be time for Mario Draghi to sound the all-clear.

    While the region is expe­ri­enc­ing the fastest con­sumer-price growth in more than three years, it’s still only at about half the pace of where the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank pres­i­dent would like it. At the same time, the core mea­sure is even low­er. It stood at 0.9 per­cent in Decem­ber — a five month high, but still only 0.3 per­cent­age point away from its all-time low two years ago.

    The ques­tion for the ECB’s Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil, which announced an exten­sion of quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing last month, is whether this is part of its long-await­ed “sus­tained adjust­ment” in infla­tion or a tech­ni­cal move relat­ed to com­mod­i­ty prices and a weak­er cur­ren­cy. Along with con­tin­ued signs of eco­nom­ic growth, the data may rein­force the posi­tion of the cen­tral bank’s hawk­ish offi­cials as they pre­pare for their first pol­i­cy meet­ing of the year in two weeks.

    “Under­ly­ing infla­tion, which is what the ECB is most wor­ried about, is real­ly going nowhere,” said Jamie Mur­ray, an econ­o­mist at Bloomberg Intel­li­gence in Lon­don. “It will keep pol­i­cy loose. We’re going to see some move­ment in head­line infla­tion, but the ECB is focused on core and under­ly­ing and that’s what mat­ters.”

    Even so, Bun­des­bank Pres­i­dent Jens Wei­d­mann has argued in favor of a swift unwind­ing of stim­u­lus once price growth allows, and Exec­u­tive Board mem­ber Benoit Coeure told Boersen-Zeitung last week that infla­tion could face upside risks.

    ...

    “While the region is expe­ri­enc­ing the fastest con­sumer-price growth in more than three years, it’s still only at about half the pace of where the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank pres­i­dent would like it. At the same time, the core mea­sure is even low­er. It stood at 0.9 per­cent in Decem­ber — a five month high, but still only 0.3 per­cent­age point away from its all-time low two years ago.

    That “spec­tre” of defla­tion sure is per­sis­tent­ly haunt­ing. But how about we ignore that and repeat the ECB’s dis­as­trous rates hikes of 2011 instead. The same rate hikes that led to the ECB’s 2012 pledge to “do what­ev­er it takes” to avoid a col­lapse of the euro­zone. That same pledge that’s still in effect today. How about we ignore all that so Ger­man savers can make a lit­tle bit more in inter­est.

    And that’s part of what’s so scary about the euro­zone: Thanks large­ly to the pro-aus­ter­i­ty/pro-defla­tion far-right eco­nom­ic ide­ol­o­gy that dom­i­nate the think­ing in the most pow­er­ful nations in the euro­zone, the Ghost of Pol­i­cy Mis­takes Past is gen­er­al­ly the Ghost of Pol­i­cy Mis­takes Present and Future too. It’s a “spec­tre” that’s unfor­tu­nate­ly very real.

    Boo.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 11, 2017, 11:52 pm
  4. hings are heat­ing up in Por­tu­gal’s bond mar­kets. Or cool­ing off. Or both. Demand is cool­ing off for Por­tuguese bonds and that’s heat­ing up the ten­sions between Por­tu­gal’s loom­ing ECB QE dilem­ma — hit­ting that 33 per­cent cap of total issued bonds that the ECB can pur­chase as part of its QE pro­gram accord­ing to its self-imposed rules — and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a sin­gle rat­ings down­grade could end up knock­ing Por­tu­gal’s cred­it rat­ing into junk sta­tus and knock­ing it out of the QE pro­gram alto­geth­er. So while there isn’t a clear tem­per­a­ture-based metaphor for the sit­u­a­tion since demand is cool­ing, ‘increas­ing­ly strained’ is an apt descrip­tion.

    But before we take a look at the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, let’s go back to ear­ly Octo­ber of last year, when it still was­n’t clear if Por­tu­gal was going to keep its above-junk cred­it rat­ing (which it kept on Octo­ber 21 when DBRS — the last rat­ings firm to give Por­tu­gal and invest­ment grade on its debt — decid­ed to main­tain that rat­ing) and it also still was­n’t clear that the ECB was going to total­ly screw Por­tu­gal in the QE pro­gram by refus­ing to raise the 33 per­cent cap on the total per­cent of a coun­try’s bonds the ECB could pur­chase for the pro­gram (which hap­pened on Decem­ber 8 when the ECB decid­ed to total­ly screw Por­tu­gal). And of course, things were increas­ing­ly strained in gen­er­al. So strained, as we’ll see, that Por­tu­gal had to can­cel plans for a round syn­di­cat­ed bond issuance (bonds that are sold by a gov­ern­ment to a hand­ful of banks who resell them, as opposed to a nor­mal bond auc­tion to a broad­er mar­ket). And when a sov­er­eign nation starts get­ting frisky about its syn­di­cat­ed bonds, things are gen­er­al­ly look­ing a lit­tle omi­nous, as was the case for Por­tu­gal back in ear­ly Octo­ber.

    But before we take a look at that ear­ly Octo­ber omi­nous­ness, let’s take a quick look at the nice arti­cle describ­ing what syn­di­cat­ed bonds are and why they’re some­thing a coun­try fac­ing trou­bles in the bond mar­ket might want to con­sid­er. The arti­cle is from ear­ly 2010 and about Greece’s deci­sion that year to start issu­ing syn­di­cat­ed bonds. This is, of course, short­ly before Greece got its first “bailout”/austerity treat­ment in May 2010 that doomed it to years of aus­ter­i­ty. Again, nation states don’t gen­er­al­ly want to issue syn­di­cat­ed bonds unless they have to:

    Reuters

    What’s a syn­di­cat­ed bond?

    By Felix Salmon
    March 31, 2010

    The term has been around for a lit­tle while now, but only recent­ly has the con­cept of a syn­di­cat­ed bond been com­mon­place in news sto­ries, and it seems to have arrived with­out any­body explain­ing what it is.

    Most of the ref­er­ences to syn­di­cat­ed bonds are com­ing from Greece these days, so I phoned up George Geor­giopou­los, Reuters’s man in Athens, and got him to explain them to me.

    The con­fus­ing thing here is that only sov­er­eigns issue syn­di­cat­ed bonds, because only sov­er­eigns don’t issue syn­di­cat­ed bonds.

    OK, let me try again. As a base case, essen­tial­ly all bonds are syn­di­cat­ed. If a com­pa­ny wants to issue bonds, it will find a group of banks to under­write its bond issue and sell those bonds to investors. And if a sov­er­eign wants to issue bonds in a for­eign cur­ren­cy, it will do the same thing. None of these bonds are ever referred to as “syn­di­cat­ed bonds”, though — they’re just old-fash­ioned bonds, or glob­al bonds, or what­ev­er. The exis­tence of a bookrun­ner and an under­writ­ing syn­di­cate is sim­ply tak­en for grant­ed.

    The excep­tion to that rule is when gov­ern­ments issue debt in their own cur­ren­cy. Nor­mal­ly, that kind of thing is han­dled through auc­tions, where a group of pri­ma­ry deal­ers, who promise to make a mar­ket in gov­ern­ment debt, bid on new issuance. It’s always pos­si­ble, how­ev­er, that such an auc­tion might fail, and that the gov­ern­ment won’t be able to issue all the debt that it wants, for lack of bids from the pri­ma­ry deal­ers.

    So Greece has start­ed issu­ing occa­sion­al syn­di­cat­ed bonds, where it does just what com­pa­nies do when they want to issue debt: it gets a small syn­di­cate of banks togeth­er, and the banks under­write the bond, promis­ing to buy it if there aren’t enough bids in the mar­ket. Then they go out and build a book and sell the bond to investors just like they would with a cor­po­rate issue. This way of doing things guar­an­tees that the gov­ern­ment will be able to sell all the bonds it wants to sell.

    Think of it this way: most bonds are syn­di­cat­ed, while gov­ern­ment bonds are auc­tioned. If you see a ref­er­ence to a “syn­di­cat­ed bond”, that means that a gov­ern­ment is not auc­tion­ing its bonds, and has decid­ed to syn­di­cate them instead.

    ...

    “So Greece has start­ed issu­ing occa­sion­al syn­di­cat­ed bonds, where it does just what com­pa­nies do when they want to issue debt: it gets a small syn­di­cate of banks togeth­er, and the banks under­write the bond, promis­ing to buy it if there aren’t enough bids in the mar­ket. Then they go out and build a book and sell the bond to investors just like they would with a cor­po­rate issue. This way of doing things guar­an­tees that the gov­ern­ment will be able to sell all the bonds it wants to sell.”

    So that was Greece in ear­ly 2010: when uncer­tain­ty is high in the bond mar­kets it’s a good time for syn­di­cat­ed bonds...because it’s a bad time in gen­er­al. Now, flash­ing for­ward to ear­ly Octo­ber of last year and flash­ing over to Por­tu­gal, we find a lev­el of omi­nous­ness that Por­tu­gal had to can­cel a planned syn­di­cat­ed bond issuance. It was pret­ty omi­nous:

    Reuters

    Por­tu­gal knocks syn­di­ca­tion plans on head, DBRS looms clos­er

    * Syn­di­ca­tion not men­tioned in Q4 plans

    * Invest­ment-grade rat­ing hangs by thread

    By Helene Durand and Lau­ra Ben­itez
    Thu Oct 6, 2016 | 10:12am EDT

    LONDON, Oct 6 (IFR) — Por­tu­gal has qui­et­ly ditched plans to raise fund­ing via a syn­di­ca­tion as con­cerns around the sov­er­eign’s eli­gi­bil­i­ty for the ECB QE pro­gramme con­tin­ue to pres­sure the coun­try’s bonds.

    The sov­er­eign in its third quar­ter guide­lines had announced its inten­tion to issue bonds using a com­bi­na­tion of syn­di­ca­tions and auc­tions.

    How­ev­er, the men­tion of a pos­si­ble syn­di­ca­tion was dropped on Mon­day when the sov­er­eign released guide­lines for Q4.

    Unlike auc­tions, which tend to be run-of-the-mill affairs, syn­di­ca­tions can leave sov­er­eigns more exposed to exe­cu­tion risk as banks need to find enough demand to cov­er a trans­ac­tion.

    While Por­tu­gal’s Q4 state­ment said it would con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor mar­ket con­di­tions and that this may result in a change of the guide­lines, the sov­er­eign has lit­tle chance to access the mar­ket until Octo­ber 21 at the ear­li­est.

    That is when DBRS will say whether it has kept Por­tu­gal’s rat­ing in invest­ment-grade ter­ri­to­ry — the last thread keep­ing the coun­try’s debt eli­gi­ble for the ECB pur­chase pro­gramme.

    “If there is a way for Por­tu­gal to remain in the QE pro­gramme, then their fund­ing pro­gramme can go on as planned,” said John Tay­lor, port­fo­lio man­ag­er, fixed income at Alliance Bern­stein.

    “If that isn’t the case, there would be a neg­a­tive reac­tion in the mar­ket and it’s dif­fi­cult to say exact­ly what sort of impact that would have on their yield and spread.”

    Ten-year Por­tuguese gov­ern­ment yields have risen since the begin­ning of the year as con­cerns around the health of the coun­try’s econ­o­my and bank­ing sec­tor have esca­lat­ed.

    They were quot­ed at 3.52% on Thurs­day after­noon, hav­ing start­ed the year at 2.56%, accord­ing to Thom­son Reuters data.

    “Por­tu­gal is already trad­ing around 250bp wide of Spain so the mar­ket is acknowl­edg­ing this risk to some extent,” said Tay­lor.

    “Greece is yield­ing 8.5% ver­sus 3.5% for Por­tu­gal and is much low­er rat­ed but does indi­cate that Por­tuguese yields could move quite a long way in this sce­nario.”

    Things have not been helped by com­ments made by DBRS’s head of sov­er­eign rat­ings. He told Reuters in the mid­dle of August that while the out­look on the sov­er­eign’s BBB (low) rat­ing remained sta­ble, pres­sures appeared to be mount­ing.

    He told the FT on Thurs­day that Por­tu­gal was in a “vicious cir­cle” and had “large struc­tur­al prob­lems.”

    Moody’s and Fitch down­grad­ed the sov­er­eign to junk at the end of 2015, to Ba1 and BB+, join­ing S&P, which already rat­ed it at BB+.

    FALLING BEHIND

    The fail­ure to con­duct a syn­di­ca­tion in the third quar­ter has also meant Por­tu­gal could now fall short of the 18bn-20bn gross issuance tar­get it had out­lined for 2016.

    Accord­ing to a pre­sen­ta­tion dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 22, the IGCP said it had raised 13bn of medi­um and long-term debt between Jan­u­ary and July this year. Since then, it has raised 1.75bn in two auc­tions. Even if Por­tu­gal man­ages to print the upper end of the auc­tion amounts it has out­lined for Q4, it will still fall short of its year­ly tar­get, poten­tial­ly by as much as 3.25bn.

    ...

    “While Por­tu­gal’s Q4 state­ment said it would con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor mar­ket con­di­tions and that this may result in a change of the guide­lines, the sov­er­eign has lit­tle chance to access the mar­ket until Octo­ber 21 at the ear­li­est.”

    Yeah, while it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a hor­ri­ble sign when a coun­try is resort­ing to syn­di­cat­ed bonds it’s still not the best sign — since that implies that it’s going to pay a high­er inter­est rate to essen­tial­ly pay for a hand­ful of larg­er banks to find the rest of the buy­ers for those bonds (the large banks buy all the bonds in the syn­di­cat­ed issuance and then resell them) — but it’s a much worse sign if you need to can­cel your syn­di­cat­ed bond issuance. But it was also not at all sur­pris­ing for Por­tu­gal to run into these trou­bles giv­en what it was fac­ing in ear­ly Octo­ber of last year. It’s not easy issu­ing new bonds, syn­di­cat­ed or oth­er­wise, when the coun­try is sit­ting there and wait­ing for a sin­gle rat­ings agency to main­tain its non-junk cred­it rat­ing.

    Of course, the Cana­di­an rat­ings firm DBRS did indeed uphold Por­tu­gal’s non-junk sta­tus a cou­ple weeks lat­er (for now). And then the ECB decid­ed to total­ly screw Por­tu­gal in ear­ly Decem­ber (for­ev­er, seem­ing­ly). Two steps for­ward and two steps back. And that brings us to today. Or, rather, a week and a half ago when Por­tu­gal was fac­ing the tough­est bond sale in years and these are syn­di­cat­ed bond it’s sell­ing:

    Reuters

    Por­tu­gal seeks to raise funds in tough­est bond sale in years

    * Syn­di­cat­ed sale could come soon: financse min­is­ter

    * Bank­ing cri­sis, lack of ECB sup­port add to mar­ket con­cerns

    * Investor warns down­grade could push Por­tu­gal out of mar­ket

    * Steep curve makes sell­ing 10-year bench­mark chal­leng­ing

    Abhi­nav Ram­narayan
    Mon­day, 9 Jan 2017 | 12:52 PM ET

    LONDON, Jan 9 (Reuters) — Por­tu­gal is seek­ing to raise funds through a syn­di­cat­ed sale of bonds just as a per­sis­tent bank­ing cri­sis, reduced sup­port from the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank and a slug­gish econ­o­my have pushed its bor­row­ing costs to one-year highs.

    Por­tu­gal’s finance min­is­ter Mario Cen­teno told Reuters in an inter­view that a syn­di­cat­ed bond issue — under which banks dis­trib­ute new bonds to a vari­ety of investors — is like­ly to be launched soon.

    Two pri­ma­ry deal­ers said Por­tu­gal’s debt office is mon­i­tor­ing the mar­ket and a deal could be launched as ear­ly as this week.

    But investors have turned wary of Por­tu­gal’s gov­ern­ment bonds as the threat of a cred­it rat­ing down­grade to junk and reduced ECB pur­chas­es have sent bor­row­ing costs spik­ing to their high­est lev­el in years.

    Ten-year bond yields have risen near­ly 50 basis points in the past four weeks to top 4 per­cent for the first time in near­ly a year. On Mon­day the 10-year bench­mark bond hit a high of 4.2 per­cent.

    Apart from a cou­ple of brief spikes in Feb­ru­ary 2016, the last time the bond yield­ed more than 4 per­cent on a sus­tained basis was back in August 2014.

    “This means you get addi­tion­al yield as an investor, but obvi­ous­ly there’s a rea­son why you get that addi­tion­al yield — and the dri­vers for the rise in yields are not exhaust­ed yet,” said Com­merzbank strate­gist David Sch­nautz.

    “There is still a clean-up of the bank­ing sec­tor that needs to be done and the oth­er ele­phant in the room is the ECB — they are close to the lim­it of Por­tuguese gov­ern­ment bonds they can buy.”

    ...

    Many expect­ed the ECB to remove a cap on the per­cent­age of gov­ern­ment bonds it can own to allow for more pur­chas­es of Por­tuguese gov­ern­ment bonds, among oth­ers, to alle­vi­ate a short­age of assets for its bond-buy­ing scheme.

    But the cen­tral bank chose to enact oth­er mea­sures, such as buy­ing bonds that yield below the deposit rate, to solve that issue — a change that sug­gests it would con­cen­trate pur­chas­es on high­er-rat­ed euro zone gov­ern­ments such as Ger­many.

    Indeed, the ECB bought far few­er Por­tuguese gov­ern­ment bonds last month than its rules dic­tate, as it approach­es that ceil­ing.

    Rabobank ana­lysts believe the ECB could hit the ceil­ing by June this year, fac­tor­ing in poten­tial new bond issuance by Por­tu­gal and changes to the bond-buy­ing scheme.

    ACCESS THREAT

    Blue­bay Asset Man­age­ment port­fo­lio man­ag­er Mark Dowd­ing said there is even a risk that Por­tu­gal could, in the worst case, end up los­ing mar­ket access.

    “You can imag­ine a sequence of events where there’s a neg­a­tive devel­op­ment in the bank­ing sec­tor, or Por­tu­gal los­es its invest­ment-grade rat­ing, spreads would go from 350 basis points to 450 basis points,” he said, refer­ring to the extra yield investors might demand to hold Por­tuguese rather than Ger­man bonds.

    “In the mean­time, Bund yields will have gone high­er and Por­tu­gal could have to pay 5 per­cent on its debt, debt to GDP (gross domes­tic prod­uct) would rise and there is no one to bail them out and it enters a death spi­ral,” he said last month in the after­math of the ECB’s changes to its bond buy­ing pro­gram.

    Jan­u­ary is tra­di­tion­al­ly a busy month for Euro­pean gov­ern­ment bond issuance, and Por­tu­gal has cho­sen this month to sell syn­di­cat­ed debt for the past four years.

    Its pri­ma­ry deal­ers say this year’s sale will be more chal­leng­ing than at any point since the euro zone debt crises of 2010–2012.

    In the last two years Por­tu­gal has issued new 10-year bench­mark bonds in Jan­u­ary, but this time “the steep­ness of the curve rep­re­sents a chal­lenge,” one pri­ma­ry deal­er said. “If you look at the (yield) dif­fer­ence between Spain’s five-year and 10-year bonds, it is around 120 basis points. For Por­tu­gal it is over 200 bps — that’s a very, very steep curve,” said one.

    “From a cost financ­ing per­spec­tive it makes sense for them to do some­thing short­er.”

    How­ev­er, issu­ing a very short-dat­ed bond may defeat the pur­pose of syn­di­ca­tion, as such bonds are gen­er­al­ly sold via auc­tions.

    “They have a dif­fi­cult deci­sion to make — they gen­er­al­ly issue a 10-year at this time of the year, but a five- or a sev­en-year would make more sense,” said a sec­ond pri­ma­ry deal­er. “It is not a slam dunk by any means.”

    “But investors have turned wary of Por­tu­gal’s gov­ern­ment bonds as the threat of a cred­it rat­ing down­grade to junk and reduced ECB pur­chas­es have sent bor­row­ing costs spik­ing to their high­est lev­el in years.”

    Yeah, that’s not good. Or to put it anoth­er way, it has­n’t been this bad since the 2010–2012 peri­od when the ear­ly pre-QE phase of the euro­zone cri­sis was unfolding...which is anoth­er way of say­ing it’s pret­ty bad:

    ...

    Its pri­ma­ry deal­ers say this year’s sale will be more chal­leng­ing than at any point since the euro zone debt crises of 2010–2012.

    ...

    Yeah, that does­n’t sound good. Or cheap.

    So what’s the ECB going to do with Por­tu­gal’s bond mar­kets con­tin­u­ing to flash warn­ing signs? Is the euro­zone’s cen­tral bank going to just let anoth­er euro­zone coun­try drift into the “bailout” zone? Because that’s what will hap­pen if things con­tin­ue to get worse. That remains to be seen but keep in mind that the few­er bonds Por­tu­gal can issue the few­er bonds the ECB can pur­chase in the QE. That’s how the ECB’s QE rules work. That 33 per­cent cap is a cap based on the total bonds issued by a euro­zone mem­ber state, so if Por­tu­gal finds itself in a sit­u­a­tion where it can’t tap the bond mar­kets as much as it would like to do, it can’t tap that QE as much either. And there aren’t actu­al­ly a lot options for the ECB of Por­tu­gal either thanks to the insane self-imposed ECB QE rules:

    Bloomberg Mar­kets

    Por­tu­gal Bonds Fal­ter as ECB Run­ning Out of Eli­gi­ble Debt to Buy

    * Con­tin­ued devi­a­tion from ECB bond-buy­ing rules looks like­ly
    * Bond yields have climbed as mar­ket wakes up to low­er demand

    by Stephen Spratt
    Jan­u­ary 16, 2017, 7:28 AM CST

    The Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank is run­ning out of Por­tuguese bonds to buy.

    The cen­tral bank’s hold­ings of Portugal’s debt are already push­ing the lim­it set by its own guide­lines, leav­ing it like­ly to buy less this year to avoid break­ing those rules. That prospect has led to a sell­off in Por­tuguese gov­ern­ment bonds, with 10-year yields hav­ing risen almost 40 basis points since the ECB’s Decem­ber meet­ing to hit an 11-month high last week.

    The ECB will have to scale back Por­tuguese pur­chas­es by around a half, accord­ing to Com­merzbank AG, while ABN AMRO Group NV sees it stop­ping or sus­pend­ing them by June. To make up the short­fall, the ECB may con­tin­ue to buy more bonds from oth­er coun­tries with a greater pool of eli­gi­ble secu­ri­ties, such as Ger­many and France.

    “We remain cau­tious on PGBs over­all,” said Bank of Amer­i­ca Mer­rill Lynch ana­lysts includ­ing Ruairi Houri­hane in a report on Jan. 13. “The QE tweaks announced in Decem­ber ben­e­fit­ed core coun­tries far more than Por­tu­gal and the periph­ery. In fact, the new QE para­me­ters made the con­tin­u­a­tion of QE in Por­tu­gal slight­ly more dif­fi­cult.”

    ...

    ““We remain cau­tious on PGBs over­all,” said Bank of Amer­i­ca Mer­rill Lynch ana­lysts includ­ing Ruairi Houri­hane in a report on Jan. 13. “The QE tweaks announced in Decem­ber ben­e­fit­ed core coun­tries far more than Por­tu­gal and the periph­ery. In fact, the new QE para­me­ters made the con­tin­u­a­tion of QE in Por­tu­gal slight­ly more dif­fi­cult.”

    Yep, the ECB’s Decem­ber 8th tweaks to the QE pro­gram made things bet­ter for the euro­zone core and worse for the periph­ery. And a month lat­er we find Por­tu­gal fac­ing spik­ing bor­row­ing costs with the pos­si­bil­i­ty that it will hit the 33 per­cent cap by June and get effec­tive­ly sus­pend­ed from the QE pro­gram. What help­ful tweaks.

    And what might the ECB do in response to this lat­est euro­zone cri­sis flare up?

    ...
    The ECB will have to scale back Por­tuguese pur­chas­es by around a half, accord­ing to Com­merzbank AG, while ABN AMRO Group NV sees it stop­ping or sus­pend­ing them by June. To make up the short­fall, the ECB may con­tin­ue to buy more bonds from oth­er coun­tries with a greater pool of eli­gi­ble secu­ri­ties, such as Ger­many and France.
    ...

    Buy more French and Ger­man bonds because that won’t break the QE rules.

    Yes, things are heat­ing up in the Por­tuguese bond mar­kets as the euro­zone social con­tract con­tin­ues to cool off.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 18, 2017, 11:45 pm
  5. Don­ald Trump’s eco­nom­ic advis­er, Peter Navar­ro, had a rather inter­est­ing expla­na­tion for why the US was­n’t going to be mov­ing for­ward with TTIP trade agree­ment with the EU: Ger­many’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the euro­zone effec­tive­ly made Ger­many a cur­ren­cy manip­u­la­tor since the euro is much cheap­er than a Deutsche Mark would have been. Amaz­ing­ly for the Trump team, it was­n’t an entire­ly invalid point.

    Berlin, not sur­pris­ing­ly, did­n’t agree with Navar­ro’s asser­tions, reply­ing that Ger­many can’t con­trol the ECB and its quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing pro­grams that are dri­ving down the val­ue of the euro so it’s not Ger­many’s fault that the euro is so cheap. And while that’s a rather debat­able sug­ges­tion from Berlin (it ignores the role Berlin’s aus­ter­i­ty demands and refusal to set up a trans­fer union have played in cre­at­ing the endur­ing eco­nom­ic col­lapse of much of Europe), it’s also a response to a dif­fer­ent charge than the one Navar­ro was mak­ing:

    The Finan­cial Times

    Trump’s top trade advis­er accus­es Ger­many of cur­ren­cy exploita­tion

    Berlin is using a ‘gross­ly under­val­ued’ euro to gain advan­tage over trad­ing part­ners, says Navar­ro

    by: Shawn Don­nan in Wash­ing­ton
    1/31/2017

    Ger­many is using a “gross­ly under­val­ued” euro to “exploit” the US and its EU part­ners, Don­ald Trump’s top trade advis­er has said in com­ments like­ly to trig­ger alarm in Europe’s largest econ­o­my.

    Peter Navar­ro, the head of Mr Trump’s new Nation­al Trade Coun­cil, told the Finan­cial Times the euro was like an “implic­it Deutsche Mark” whose low val­u­a­tion gave Ger­many an advan­tage over its main trad­ing part­ners. His views sug­gest the new admin­is­tra­tion is focus­ing on cur­ren­cy as part of its hard-charg­ing approach on trade ties.

    In a depar­ture from past US pol­i­cy, Mr Navar­ro also called Ger­many one of the main hur­dles to a US trade deal with the EU and declared talks with the bloc over a US-EU agree­ment, known as the Transat­lantic Trade and Invest­ment Part­ner­ship, dead.

    Angela Merkel, the Ger­man chan­cel­lor, respond­ed to Mr Navarro’s alle­ga­tions, say­ing Ger­many could not influ­ence the euro. At a press con­fer­ence in Stock­holm with Ste­fan Lofven, Sweden’s prime min­is­ter, Ms Merkel said Ger­many has always “sup­port­ed an inde­pen­dent Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank”.

    ...

    The new pres­i­dent says he prefers bilat­er­al trade deals rather than the broad mul­ti­lat­er­al accords pur­sued by Barack Oba­ma, his pre­de­ces­sor. Mr Trump last week also with­drew from a 12-coun­try Pacif­ic Rim deal nego­ti­at­ed by Mr Oba­ma.

    “A big obsta­cle to view­ing TTIP as a bilat­er­al deal is Ger­many, which con­tin­ues to exploit oth­er coun­tries in the EU as well as the US with an ‘implic­it Deutsche Mark’ that is gross­ly under­val­ued,” Mr Navar­ro said. “The Ger­man struc­tur­al imbal­ance in trade with the rest of the EU and the US under­scores the eco­nom­ic het­ero­gene­ity [diver­si­ty] with­in the EU — ergo, this is a mul­ti­lat­er­al deal in bilat­er­al dress.”

    Germany’s large trade sur­plus with the US and much of the euro­zone has been a point of fric­tion in Brus­sels and Wash­ing­ton for sev­er­al years, with both cap­i­tals call­ing for Berlin to stim­u­late domes­tic demand to rebal­ance its econ­o­my.

    Crit­ics have argued Berlin has dis­pro­por­tion­al­ly ben­e­fit­ed from weak­ness in the rest of the euro­zone, which has held the euro low­er than oth­er region­al cur­ren­cies, like the Swiss Franc, mak­ing Ger­man exports cheap­er in over­seas mar­kets like Chi­na and the US.

    Despite those dif­fer­ences, most debate over Ger­man eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy dur­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion was cloaked in diplo­mat­ic lan­guage; Mr Navarro’s com­ments high­light a grow­ing will­ing­ness by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to antag­o­nise EU lead­ers and par­tic­u­lar­ly the Ger­man chan­cel­lor.

    Besides pub­licly sup­port­ing the British gov­ern­ment in its nego­ti­a­tions with the EU over the terms of its exit, Mr Trump called the EU a vehi­cle for Ger­many, and Nato an obso­lete alliance.

    Mr Navarro’s inter­ven­tion fol­lows a vis­it to Wash­ing­ton last week by There­sa May, the British prime min­is­ter, in which she and Mr Trump dis­cussed ways to launch nego­ti­a­tions for a US-UK trade deal. Mr Navar­ro said the Brex­it vote marked the death knell of a US-EU deal; Britain had been one of the pact’s lead­ing advo­cates.

    “Brex­it killed TTIP on both sides of the Atlantic even before the elec­tion of Don­ald Trump. I per­son­al­ly view TTIP as a mul­ti­lat­er­al deal with many coun­tries under one ‘roof’,” Mr Navar­ro wrote in emailed respons­es to FT ques­tions.

    Although crit­i­cisms of Ger­man eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy have been a sta­ple of Group of 20 gath­er­ing since the height of the euro­zone cri­sis, the view Berlin is inten­tion­al­ly advo­cat­ing a weak euro to its own eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit is not wide­ly shared.

    The euro has weak­ened against the dol­lar over the past two years as the paths of the cen­tral banks of the two cur­ren­cy zones have split. The Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank’s mass bond-buy­ing pro­gramme has weak­ened the sin­gle cur­ren­cy, while rate hikes by the US Fed has strength­ened the dol­lar.

    But Berlin has been a lead­ing crit­ic of the ECB’s strat­e­gy. The Bun­des­bank has called for an end to bond buy­ing, while law­mak­ers have pushed for high­er rates — both mea­sures which would strength­en the euro.

    Mr Navar­ro said one of the administration’s trade pri­or­i­ties was unwind­ing and repa­tri­at­ing the inter­na­tion­al sup­ply chains on which many US multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies rely, tak­ing aim at one of the pil­lars of the mod­ern glob­al econ­o­my.

    ...

    ““A big obsta­cle to view­ing TTIP as a bilat­er­al deal is Ger­many, which con­tin­ues to exploit oth­er coun­tries in the EU as well as the US with an ‘implic­it Deutsche Mark’ that is gross­ly under­val­ued,” Mr Navar­ro said. “The Ger­man struc­tur­al imbal­ance in trade with the rest of the EU and the US under­scores the eco­nom­ic het­ero­gene­ity [diver­si­ty] with­in the EU — ergo, this is a mul­ti­lat­er­al deal in bilat­er­al dress.””

    It’s hard to argue with the idea of a sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly under­val­ued Deutsche Mark since that’s the only thing that could have math­e­mat­i­cal­ly hap­pened when one of the strongest cur­ren­cies on the plan­et got pooled with a bunch of weak­er ones. But there is one way to argue with it: hear a dif­fer­ent point instead — like the point that Ger­many was forc­ing the euro over­all to get too cheap — and respond to that one, which is what Angela Merkel clear­ly did:

    ...

    Angela Merkel, the Ger­man chan­cel­lor, respond­ed to Mr Navarro’s alle­ga­tions, say­ing Ger­many could not influ­ence the euro. At a press con­fer­ence in Stock­holm with Ste­fan Lofven, Sweden’s prime min­is­ter, Ms Merkel said Ger­many has always “sup­port­ed an inde­pen­dent Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank”.

    ...

    So that’s how this strange tus­sle between Trump and Ger­many played out: Team Trump made a rare valid point (the euro replace­ment for the Deutsche Mark makes Ger­many’s cur­rent too cheap), and that point got mis­con­strued as a com­plete dif­fer­ent point that Angela Merkel then respond­ed to (that Ger­many is mak­ing the euro too cheap to which Merkel replied, no, Ger­many does­n’t set ECB pol­i­cy). But while it’s clear that there was a lack of clar­i­ty in how Navar­ro’s asser­tions were inter­pret­ed, it’s still very unclear how this tus­sle is going to play out in the long-run. Because this top­ic pre­sum­ably isn’t going to go away entire­ly. Espe­cial­ly since the way most of the press and peo­ple in gen­er­al appeared to inter­pret Navar­ro’s point was the way Angela Merkel decid­ed to mis­in­ter­pret it:

    Slate

    Trump’s Trade Guru Just Trashed Ger­many. He Actu­al­ly Had a Point!

    By Jor­dan Weiss­mann
    Jan. 31 2017 6:37 PM

    Peter Navar­ro, Don­ald Trump’s White House trade guru, typ­i­cal­ly reserves his harsh­est rhetoric for Chi­na. But Tues­day, the econ­o­mist man­aged to cause a bit of an inter­na­tion­al stir by lay­ing into Ger­many, which he accused of exploit­ing the Unit­ed States and its fel­low Euro­pean Union mem­bers with the help of a “gross­ly under­val­ued” cur­ren­cy.

    He was­n’t all wrong.

    Navar­ro made his com­ments in an email inter­view with the Finan­cial Times, which seem­ing­ly want­ed to know his thought on the Transat­lantic Trade and Invest­ment Part­ner­ship, aka the big free-trade deal between the U.S. and the EU. Navar­ro was not encour­ag­ing about it. As a rule, the admin­is­tra­tion plans to pur­sue bilat­er­al trade deals, not big mul­ti­lat­er­al trade agree­ments that rope in lots of dif­fer­ent coun­tries. And even though the EU is a uni­fied trade bloc, Navar­ro does­n’t feel like a pact with all of its mem­bers would pass the White House­’s test. Why not? In part, Berlin.

    ...

    The glob­al reac­tion was not exact­ly kind. The FT itself haugh­ti­ly explained that “the view Berlin is inten­tion­al­ly advo­cat­ing a weak euro to its own eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit is not wide­ly shared.” Asked about the remarks, Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel essen­tial­ly shrugged and sug­gest­ed there was­n’t much her coun­try could do to influ­ence the euro’s exchange rate, because it did­n’t con­trol the EU’s mon­e­tary pol­i­cy. “We won’t exer­cise any influ­ence over the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank, so I can’t and I don’t want to change the sit­u­a­tion as it is now,” Merkel said. Ana­lysts were also dis­mis­sive of Navar­ro. “He hasn’t under­stood the euro or this is a seri­ous con­spir­a­cy accu­sa­tion,” Hen­rik Ender­lein, direc­tor of the Jacques Delors Insti­tut in Berlin, told the Tele­graph.

    But all of this sort of missed the point. Based on his quote, Navar­ro was­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly say­ing the euro was too cheap across the board. Instead, he was mere­ly say­ing it was too cheap for Ger­many. This is some­thing vir­tu­al­ly every­one agrees on, except for maybe the Ger­mans them­selves. Were the deutsche mark still around, Germany’s mas­sive trade sur­plus, which as a per­cent­age of its econ­o­my is actu­al­ly larg­er than Chi­na’s, would have forced up the val­ue of its cur­ren­cy, lead­ing it to import more and export less. Instead, Ger­many is locked into a trade and cur­ren­cy union with a group of eco­nom­i­cal­ly weak­er coun­tries who keep the val­ue of the euro down, which makes it eas­i­er for fac­to­ries in Wolfs­burg and Munich and Bre­men to sell their wares both inside and out­side Europe.

    This real­ly isn’t con­tro­ver­sial. Even For­mer Fed Chair­man Ben Bernanke had a whole spiel about this a cou­ple years ago. “Although the euro—the cur­ren­cy that Ger­many shares with 18 oth­er countries—may (or may not) be at the right lev­el for all 19 euro-zone coun­tries as a group, it is too weak (giv­en Ger­man wages and pro­duc­tion costs) to be con­sis­tent with bal­anced Ger­man trade.”

    There’s also plen­ty Ger­many could do to fix its trade imbal­ance, but isn’t. One rea­son it has such a large sur­plus from exports is that the coun­try has an exceed­ing­ly high nation­al sav­ings rate—basically, Ger­mans and their gov­ern­ment don’t spend enough. As Bernanke sug­gest­ed, Berlin could dab­ble more in bud­get deficits to rev up its econ­o­my, or take action to increase work­ers’ wages, both of which might lead to more imports. Alter­na­tive­ly, it could encour­age more invest­ment spend­ing by cor­po­ra­tions.

    The sta­tus quo, though, real­ly isn’t healthy. Mas­sive trade imbal­ances are not good for the glob­al econ­o­my in the long term. Sur­plus coun­tries find them­selves with giant pools of sav­ings they need to invest, which can cre­ate bub­bles and finan­cial crises. In Europe, it led cash-flush Ger­man bankscash to lend exces­sive­ly to debtor nations like Greece that weren’t able to pay it back. The ensu­ing crises, of course, led Ger­many and its north­ern neigh­bors to enforce painful aus­ter­i­ty pro­grams that helped spread mass unem­ploy­ment across the con­ti­nent. No one wants a repeat of that.

    That isn’t to say Navar­ro’s con­cerns are entire­ly on point. The idea that Ger­many might be steal­ing a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of Amer­i­can jobs these days is a bit far-fetched. But refus­ing to sign a trade pact with Europe at large unless Ger­many becomes a more respon­si­ble actor isn’t real­ly nuts. In fact, if the mes­sage were com­ing from any oth­er admin­is­tra­tion, it might serve as a nec­es­sary wake-up call.

    When a Trump­kin is right, they’re right.

    The glob­al reac­tion was not exact­ly kind. The FT itself haugh­ti­ly explained that “the view Berlin is inten­tion­al­ly advo­cat­ing a weak euro to its own eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit is not wide­ly shared.” Asked about the remarks, Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel essen­tial­ly shrugged and sug­gest­ed there was­n’t much her coun­try could do to influ­ence the euro’s exchange rate, because it did­n’t con­trol the EU’s mon­e­tary pol­i­cy. “We won’t exer­cise any influ­ence over the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank, so I can’t and I don’t want to change the sit­u­a­tion as it is now,” Merkel said. Ana­lysts were also dis­mis­sive of Navar­ro. “He hasn’t under­stood the euro or this is a seri­ous con­spir­a­cy accu­sa­tion,” Hen­rik Ender­lein, direc­tor of the Jacques Delors Insti­tut in Berlin, told the Tele­graph

    Yep, even the orig­i­nal FT arti­cle was inter­pret­ing Navar­ro’s com­ments as indi­cat­ing that it was a cri­tique against the low lev­el of the euro as opposed to the dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact the low lev­el of the euro has on Ger­many’s exports. Along with plen­ty of oth­er com­men­ta­tors and ana­lysts. And while this might seem like just a ran­dom exam­ple of a frus­trat­ing media con­fu­sion, keep in mind that hav­ing Team Trump com­plain about an over­ly weak euro (as opposed to an over­ly weak euro replace­ment for the Deutsche Mark) is exact­ly what Ger­many’s hard­lin­ers want! Because per­ceived US pres­sures on the euro­zone to raise the val­ue of the euro are basi­cal­ly a US call to do some­thing Ger­many’s right-wing has been call­ing for all along: end the ECB’s quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing pro­gram:

    The New York Times
    The Con­science of a Lib­er­al

    Ger­many, the Euro, and Cur­ren­cy Manip­u­la­tion

    Paul Krug­man
    Feb­ru­ary 1, 2017 12:49 pm

    Peter Navar­ro, the clos­est thing Trump has to an eco­nom­ic guru, made some waves by accus­ing Ger­many of being a cur­ren­cy manip­u­la­tor and sug­gest­ing that both the shad­ow Deutsche mark and the euro are under­val­ued. Leav­ing aside the dubi­ous notion that this is a good tar­get of US eco­nom­ic diplo­ma­cy, is he right?

    Yes and no. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the “no” part is what’s rel­e­vant to the US.

    Yes, Ger­many in effect has an under­val­ued cur­ren­cy rel­a­tive to what it would have with­out the euro. The fig­ure shows Ger­man prices (GDP defla­tor) rel­a­tive to Spain (which I take to rep­re­sent South­ern Europe in gen­er­al) since the euro was cre­at­ed. There was a large real depre­ci­a­tion dur­ing the euro’s good years, when Spain had mas­sive cap­i­tal inflows and an infla­tion­ary boom. This has only been part­ly reversed, despite an incred­i­ble depres­sion in Spain. Why? Because wages are down­ward sticky, and Ger­many has refused to sup­port the kind of mon­e­tary and fis­cal stim­u­lus that would raise over­all euro area infla­tion, which remains stuck at far too low a lev­el.

    So the euro sys­tem has kept Ger­many under­val­ued, on a sus­tained basis, against its neigh­bors.

    But does this mean that the euro as a whole is under­val­ued against the dol­lar? Prob­a­bly not. The euro is weak because investors see poor invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties in Europe, to an impor­tant extent because of bad demog­ra­phy, and bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ties in the U.S.. The tra­vails of the euro sys­tem may add to poor Euro­pean per­cep­tions. But there’s no clear rela­tion­ship between the prob­lems of Germany’s role with­in the euro and ques­tions of the rela­tion­ship between the euro and oth­er cur­ren­cies.

    And may I say, what is the pur­pose of hav­ing some­one con­nect­ed to the U.S. gov­ern­ment say this? Are we going to pres­sure the ECB to adopt tighter mon­e­tary pol­i­cy? I sure hope not. Are we egging on a breakup of the euro? It sure sounds like it — but that is not, not, some­thing the US gov­ern­ment should be doing. What would we say if Chi­nese offi­cials seemed to be talk­ing up a US finan­cial cri­sis? (It would, of course, be OK with Trump if the Rus­sians did it.)

    ...

    And may I say, what is the pur­pose of hav­ing some­one con­nect­ed to the U.S. gov­ern­ment say this? Are we going to pres­sure the ECB to adopt tighter mon­e­tary pol­i­cy? I sure hope not. Are we egging on a breakup of the euro? It sure sounds like it — but that is not, not, some­thing the US gov­ern­ment should be doing. What would we say if Chi­nese offi­cials seemed to be talk­ing up a US finan­cial cri­sis? (It would, of course, be OK with Trump if the Rus­sians did it.)”

    And that’s the big ques­tion here: Are we about to see the Trump admin­is­tra­tion use a fight with Ger­many to help pres­sure the euro­zone into adopt­ing a pol­i­cy — end the ECB’s QE pro­gram — that Ger­many’s right-wing has been clam­or­ing for ever since the ECB start­ed it? Because whether or not that was Navar­ro’s intent, that’s how it’s play­ing out:

    The Wall Street Jour­nal

    Draghi: Not Yet Time to Stop Euro­pean Stim­u­lus
    ECB pres­i­dent cau­tions against rely­ing too heav­i­ly on recent eco­nom­ic indi­ca­tors

    By Tom Fair­less and Todd Buell
    Updat­ed Feb. 6, 2017 2:38 p.m. ET

    Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi said Mon­day it is too ear­ly to start wind­ing down the bank’s bond pur­chas­es, brush­ing off fresh crit­i­cism of the pro­gram in Ger­many as infla­tion has picked up.

    In a hear­ing at the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment in Brus­sels, Mr. Draghi high­light­ed recent improve­ments in the eurozone’s €10 tril­lion ($10.8 tril­lion) econ­o­my, includ­ing declin­ing unem­ploy­ment. But he said pol­i­cy mak­ers wouldn’t over­re­act to a recent rise in infla­tion, which he attrib­uted to high­er ener­gy prices.

    ...

    The ECB decid­ed in Decem­ber to expand its so-called quan­ti­ta­tive-eas­ing pro­grams by a half-tril­lion euros, through the end of this year. The move has trig­gered fresh crit­i­cism of the cen­tral bank in Ger­many, Europe’s largest econ­o­my, and sparked a rare pub­lic spat between senior Ger­man and U.S. offi­cials.

    In Ger­many, the recent rise in infla­tion has fueled crit­i­cism of the ECB’s low inter­est rates, which oppo­nents have blamed for harm­ing the region’s savers.

    In the U.S.—where the Fed­er­al Reserve has start­ed to raise inter­est rates—Peter Navar­ro, the head of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Nation­al Trade Coun­cil, last week told the Finan­cial Times that Ger­many is ben­e­fit­ing from a “gross­ly under­val­ued” euro that gives the nation an unfair edge over its trad­ing part­ners.

    Ger­man Finance Min­is­ter Wolf­gang Schäuble—who has sparred ver­bal­ly with Mr. Draghi in the past—responded to the U.S. crit­i­cism, lay­ing the blame for Germany’s giant trade sur­plus­es at the ECB’s door.

    “When ECB chief Mario Draghi embarked on the easy-mon­ey poli­cies, I told him that he would dri­ve up the Ger­man trade sur­plus,” Mr. Schäu­ble told a Ger­man news­pa­per over the week­end. “I don’t want to be crit­i­cized for the con­se­quences of these poli­cies.”

    At Monday’s hear­ing, Mr. Draghi sought to dif­fuse the dis­pute. He argued that dif­fer­ent cen­tral-bank poli­cies reflect­ed “diverse posi­tions in the [eco­nom­ic] cycle” between the U.S. and the euro­zone.

    “We are not cur­ren­cy manip­u­la­tors,” Mr. Draghi said. Germany’s trade sur­plus­es, he said, reflect the nation’s strong pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, not wage manip­u­la­tion. He high­light­ed a recent U.S. Trea­sury Depart­ment report to Con­gress that absolved Ger­many of cur­ren­cy manip­u­la­tion.

    One Euro­pean law­mak­er said Mon­day that the ECB chief was a “favorite scape­goat for Mr. Schäu­ble.” A year ago, the Ger­man finance min­is­ter blamed Mr. Draghi for the rise of a pop­ulist polit­i­cal par­ty, the Alter­na­tive for Ger­many, which has been crit­i­cal of the ECB.

    Mr. Draghi declined to respond direct­ly to the finance minister’s crit­i­cism.

    “It’s under­stand­able that politi­cians, espe­cial­ly in times of elec­tions, express views on mon­e­tary pol­i­cy,” Mr. Draghi said. But also is under­stand­able that cen­tral bankers “hear them, but don’t lis­ten,” he said.

    Pressed on when the ECB might start to wind down its bond pur­chas­es, Mr. Draghi said it would only con­sid­er doing so when infla­tion ris­es across the region in a durable way. The ECB might even step up its stim­u­lus mea­sures if eco­nom­ic con­di­tions dete­ri­o­rate, he said.

    Some law­mak­ers had hoped for more clar­i­ty. “The ques­tion of how to deal with quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing is the ele­phant in the room,” said Markus Fer­ber, a Ger­man law­mak­er who is vice chair­man of the Euro­pean Parliament’s eco­nom­ic and mon­e­tary affairs com­mit­tee. “I would def­i­nite­ly like the ECB’s pres­i­dent to address the issue rather soon­er than lat­er.”

    Mr. Draghi faced a series of ques­tions about the actions of the new Trump admin­is­tra­tion, includ­ing efforts last week to start scal­ing back Dodd-Frank finan­cial reg­u­la­tions.

    Such a move, Mr. Draghi warned, could set the stage for anoth­er finan­cial cri­sis. “A com­bi­na­tion of easy mon­ey and finan­cial dereg­u­la­tion was exact­ly the ground upon which the finan­cial cri­sis devel­oped,” he said. “Frankly, I don’t see any rea­son to relax the present reg­u­la­to­ry stance.”

    ...

    “At Monday’s hear­ing, Mr. Draghi sought to dif­fuse the dis­pute. He argued that dif­fer­ent cen­tral-bank poli­cies reflect­ed “diverse posi­tions in the [eco­nom­ic] cycle” between the U.S. and the euro­zone.”

    So a week after one of Trump’s eco­nom­ic advi­sors makes this argu­ment about how Ger­many’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the euro effec­tive­ly acts like cur­ren­cy manip­u­la­tion and the point gets imme­di­ate­ly inter­pret­ed as a dif­fer­ent point about the low val­ue of the euro in gen­er­al, we still have the head of the ECB answer­ing ques­tions in a pub­lic hear­ing as if Navar­ro’s point was about the low val­ue of the euro in gen­er­al. And no appar­ent clar­i­fi­ca­tion from Team Trump on what pre­cise point Navar­ro was try­ing to make. And who knows, he prob­a­bly want­ed to make both points.

    So, inten­tion­al­ly or unin­ten­tion­al­ly, it looks like Team Trump is join­ing Team Strong Euro/Team End-QE and push­ing for a pre­ma­ture end to the ECB’s QE pro­gram and sharp rise in the euro, which is exact­ly what Berlin’s con­ser­v­a­tives want to see hap­pen. And they did it by attack­ing Ger­many. *golf clap*

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 6, 2017, 9:29 pm
  6. Oh look at that: Por­tu­gal’s left-wing anti-aus­ter­i­ty gov­ern­ment that was caus­ing so much fear in Brus­sels and Berlin last year (and almost got fined for gov­ern­ment over­spend­ing due to those fears) just report­ed the low­est bud­get deficit in four decades in 2016:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Por­tu­gal cuts bud­get deficit to low­est lev­el in 4 decades

    Feb­ru­ary 15

    LISBON, Por­tu­gal — Portugal’s gov­ern­ment has proved its crit­ics wrong, slash­ing the debt-heavy country’s bud­get deficit to its low­est lev­el in more than 40 years despite warn­ings that its anti-aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies could spell finan­cial dis­as­ter.

    Finance Min­is­ter Mario Cen­teno said Wednes­day the deficit last year was no high­er than 2.1 per­cent — well with­in the 2.5 per­cent ceil­ing stip­u­lat­ed by Euro­pean author­i­ties.

    Some oth­er euro­zone coun­tries expressed alarm when the cen­ter-left Social­ist gov­ern­ment, with the sup­port of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty and Left Bloc, took pow­er in 2015 on an anti-aus­ter­i­ty plat­form.

    Por­tu­gal need­ed a 78-bil­lion euro ($82 bil­lion) bailout in 2011, after record­ing a deficit of more than 11 per­cent the pre­vi­ous year, and euro­zone offi­cials feared it could go into anoth­er debt spi­ral under the Social­ists.

    “Some oth­er euro­zone coun­tries expressed alarm when the cen­ter-left Social­ist gov­ern­ment, with the sup­port of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty and Left Bloc, took pow­er in 2015 on an anti-aus­ter­i­ty plat­form.”

    Why, it’s almost as if the EU’s aus­ter­i­ty fetish was a hor­ri­ble idea all along. A pre­dictably hor­ri­ble dis­as­ter. Hope­ful­ly exam­ples like Por­tu­gal’s anti-aus­ter­i­ty suc­cess will one day lead to a Europe where we should no longer pre­dict pre­dictably bad aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies. Although if the lat­est study on the impact of aus­ter­i­ty is cor­rect, we prob­a­bly should­n’t assume that more exam­ples of the poor results of aus­ter­i­ty are going to change future behav­ior since econ­o­mists have known for decades that aus­ter­i­ty in the wake of a mas­sive cri­sis and near-zero inter­est rates was a real­ly bad idea, and they went ahead with it any­way. Because it’s also a great excuse to imple­ment right-wing cuts to gov­ern­ment:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Aus­ter­i­ty was a big­ger dis­as­ter than we thought

    By Matt O’Brien
    Feb­ru­ary 15, 2017

    We now take a break from your reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled scan­dals to bring you some not-so-break­ing news: aus­ter­i­ty was as big a dis­as­ter as its biggest crit­ics said it was.

    That, at least, is what econ­o­mists Christo­pher House and Lin­da Tesar of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and Christïan Proeb­st­ing of the École Poly­tech­nique Fédérale de Lau­sanne found when they looked at Europe’s bud­get-cut­ting expe­ri­ence the last eight years. It turns out that cut­ting spend­ing right after the worst cri­sis in 80 years only led to a low­er gross domes­tic prod­uct and, in the most extreme cas­es, high­er debt-to-GDP ratios. That’s right: try­ing to reduce debt lev­els some­times increased debt bur­dens.

    ...

    But let’s back up a minute. This isn’t some­thing that’s always true. In fact, it almost nev­er used to be. Cut­ting spend­ing, you see, should­n’t be a prob­lem as long as you can cut inter­est rates too. That’s because low­er bor­row­ing costs can stim­u­late the econ­o­my just as much as low­er gov­ern­ment spend­ing slows it down. What hap­pens, though, if inter­est rates are already zero, or, even worse, you’re part of a cur­ren­cy union that means you can’t deval­ue your way out of trou­ble?

    Well, noth­ing good. House, Tesar and Proeb­st­ing cal­cu­lat­ed how much each Euro­pean econ­o­my grew — or, more to the point, shrank — between the time they start­ed cut­ting their bud­gets in 2010 and the end of 2014, and then com­pared it with what actu­al­ly real­is­tic mod­els say would have hap­pened if they had­n’t done aus­ter­i­ty or adopt­ed the euro. Accord­ing to this, the hard­est-hit coun­tries of Greece, Ire­land, Italy, Por­tu­gal and Spain would have con­tract­ed by only 1 per­cent instead of the 18 per­cent they did if they had­n’t slashed spend­ing; by only 7 per­cent if they’d kept their drach­mas, pounds, liras, escu­d­os, pese­tas and the abil­i­ty to deval­ue that went along with them if they had­n’t become a part of the com­mon cur­ren­cy and out­sourced those deci­sions to Frank­furt; and only would have seen their debt-to-GDP ratios rise by eight per­cent­age points instead of the 16 they did if they had­n’t tried to get their bud­gets clos­er to being bal­anced. In short, aus­ter­i­ty hurt what it was sup­posed to help, and helped hurt the econ­o­my even more than a once-in-three-gen­er­a­tions cri­sis already had.

    That brings us to two final points. The first is that the euro real­ly has been a dooms­day device for turn­ing reces­sions into depres­sions. It’s not just that it caused the cri­sis by keep­ing mon­ey too loose for Greece and the rest of them dur­ing the boom and too tight for them dur­ing the bust. It’s also that it forced a lot of this aus­ter­i­ty on them.

    Think about it like this. Coun­tries that can print their own mon­ey nev­er have to default on their debts — they can always inflate them away instead — but ones that can’t, because, say, they share a com­mon cur­ren­cy, might have to. Just the pos­si­bil­i­ty of that, though, can be enough to make it a real­i­ty. If mar­kets are wor­ried that you might not be able to pay back your debts, they’ll make you pay a high­er inter­est rate on them — which might make it so that you real­ly can’t.

    In oth­er words, the euro can cause a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy where coun­tries can’t afford to spend any more even though spend­ing any less will only make every­thing worse. That’s actu­al­ly a pret­ty good descrip­tion of what hap­pened until the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank belat­ed­ly announced that it would do “what­ev­er it takes” to put an end to this in 2012. Which was enough to get investors to stop push­ing aus­ter­i­ty, but, alas, not politi­cians.

    It’s a good reminder that you should nev­er doubt that a small group of com­mit­ted ide­o­logues can destroy the econ­o­my. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

    That’s true whether you’re talk­ing about the Euro­pean politi­cians who pushed for the cre­ation of the euro itself — they ignored the econ­o­mists who warned them that it might turn out just as bad­ly as it has — or the ones who pushed for aus­ter­i­ty a few decades lat­er. After all, it should­n’t have been a sur­prise that try­ing to bal­ance your bud­get when inter­est rates were zero would end bad­ly.

    Econ­o­mists have known that since the 1930s. Politi­cians, though, still want­ed to do it, either because they thought deficits were moral­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, or eco­nom­i­cal­ly bad, and there was no short­age of sup­posed experts who were will­ing to tell them that they were right.

    These right-wing econ­o­mists pro­duced study after study show­ing that coun­tries had been able to suc­cess­ful­ly cut spend­ing when cen­tral banks could off­set that by cut­ting inter­est rates, and said that this proved that the same was true when inter­est rates were zero like they were at the time.

    You did­n’t need an eco­nom­ics PhD to know this did­n’t make sense, just a basic knowl­edge of eco­nom­ic his­to­ry.

    But no mat­ter. Econ­o­mists who had nev­er both­ered to learn this, or who had for­got­ten it, or who espe­cial­ly saw this as a good excuse to cut gov­ern­ment spend­ing they’d always want­ed to kept say­ing it would work even as it kept fail­ing.

    That should be as big a scan­dal as any­thing else.

    “That brings us to two final points. The first is that the euro real­ly has been a dooms­day device for turn­ing reces­sions into depres­sions. It’s not just that it caused the cri­sis by keep­ing mon­ey too loose for Greece and the rest of them dur­ing the boom and too tight for them dur­ing the bust. It’s also that it forced a lot of this aus­ter­i­ty on them.”

    Yep, while the euro acts as a nice sta­bi­liz­er for stronger coun­tries like Ger­many, for the periph­ery nations like Por­tu­gal the euro caus­es big­ger booms and big­ger busts. And result­ing manda­to­ry aus­ter­i­ty guar­an­teed an in even big­ger cri­sis that could be used to jus­ti­fy even big­ger cuts to gov­ern­ment spend­ing:

    ...

    Well, noth­ing good. House, Tesar and Proeb­st­ing cal­cu­lat­ed how much each Euro­pean econ­o­my grew — or, more to the point, shrank — between the time they start­ed cut­ting their bud­gets in 2010 and the end of 2014, and then com­pared it with what actu­al­ly real­is­tic mod­els say would have hap­pened if they had­n’t done aus­ter­i­ty or adopt­ed the euro. Accord­ing to this, the hard­est-hit coun­tries of Greece, Ire­land, Italy, Por­tu­gal and Spain would have con­tract­ed by only 1 per­cent instead of the 18 per­cent they did if they had­n’t slashed spend­ing; by only 7 per­cent if they’d kept their drach­mas, pounds, liras, escu­d­os, pese­tas and the abil­i­ty to deval­ue that went along with them if they had­n’t become a part of the com­mon cur­ren­cy and out­sourced those deci­sions to Frank­furt; and only would have seen their debt-to-GDP ratios rise by eight per­cent­age points instead of the 16 they did if they had­n’t tried to get their bud­gets clos­er to being bal­anced. In short, aus­ter­i­ty hurt what it was sup­posed to help, and helped hurt the econ­o­my even more than a once-in-three-gen­er­a­tions cri­sis already had.

    ...

    Aus­ter­i­ty was an across the board fail­ure. At least eco­nom­i­cal­ly speak­ing. It could only be con­sid­ered a suc­cess if gut­ting the gov­ern­ment is the goal. Which was pret­ty much the case:

    ...
    These right-wing econ­o­mists pro­duced study after study show­ing that coun­tries had been able to suc­cess­ful­ly cut spend­ing when cen­tral banks could off­set that by cut­ting inter­est rates, and said that this proved that the same was true when inter­est rates were zero like they were at the time.

    You did­n’t need an eco­nom­ics PhD to know this did­n’t make sense, just a basic knowl­edge of eco­nom­ic his­to­ry.

    But no mat­ter. Econ­o­mists who had nev­er both­ered to learn this, or who had for­got­ten it, or who espe­cial­ly saw this as a good excuse to cut gov­ern­ment spend­ing they’d always want­ed to kept say­ing it would work even as it kept fail­ing.

    That should be as big a scan­dal as any­thing else.

    Yep, it should all be a pret­ty mas­sive scan­dal. But isn’t. Which is, of course, pret­ty scan­dalous.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 20, 2017, 9:01 pm
  7. Here’s a bit of good news on the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank (ECB)‘s approach to the del­i­cate ques­tion of when and how fast to unwind the quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing pro­gram that’s hold­ing bor­row­ing costs down for vul­ner­a­ble euro­zone economies: One of the main met­rics the ECB is going to use to deter­mine how to mod­i­fy its stim­u­lus mea­sures and espe­cial­ly the QE mea­sures and whether or not to extend the QE pro­gram at the end of 2017 when it’s due to expire is wage growth. In addi­tion to “core” infla­tion wage growth what the ECB is heav­i­ly look­ing at. Good.

    And, yes, to some extent of course the ECB would look at wage growth because that’s tied into infla­tion. But giv­en the strong­ly bifur­cat­ed nature of the euro­zone these days — where you have a hand­ful of large strong economies pooled to a larg­er col­lec­tion of much weak­er economies, some much weak­er and in chron­ic cri­sis — the pos­si­bil­i­ty is very real of a future sce­nario where you have strong enough infla­tion in Ger­many and a few oth­er North­ern Euro­pean euro­zone economies that the over­all euro­zone infla­tion is dragged past the ECB’s 1.9 per­cent goal and trig­gers a pre­ma­ture end­ing of the QE pro­gram. So hear­ing that wage growth is going to be a major fac­tor in the ECB’s QE deci­sions is actu­al­ly some real­ly good news. Espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing how a reduc­tion in wages has been one of the pri­ma­ry pol­i­cy goals of the euro­zone’s aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies, and giv­en the enor­mous slack left in all the euro­zone economies with dou­ble dig­it unem­ploy­ment rates and large lev­els of under­em­ploy­ment. Hav­ing the ECB weigh wage growth heav­i­ly in its QE assess­ments is a rare piece of non-sup­ply-side right-wing euro­zone pol­i­cy-mak­ing news. Yay:

    Mar­ket­Watch

    Infla­tion drop like­ly to keep ECB cau­tious on QE

    By Paul Han­non
    Pub­lished: May 31, 2017 5:54 a.m. ET

    The euro­zone’s annu­al rate of infla­tion fell more sharply than expect­ed in May despite a drop in the job­less rate to a sev­en-year low, a com­bi­na­tion that is like­ly to rein­force the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank’s reluc­tance to quick­ly unwind its stim­u­lus pro­grams.

    A surge in infla­tion ear­li­er this year brought with it more force­ful calls from Ger­many and the Nether­lands for an end to neg­a­tive inter­est rates and mas­sive bond pur­chas­es.

    ECB pol­i­cy mak­ers respond­ed by express­ing doubts about the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of that high­er infla­tion. They believe that con­sumer prices will only rise steadi­ly if the gap between what the euro­zone econ­o­my can pro­duce and what it is pro­duc­ing is much nar­row­er than it is now. The most obvi­ous exam­ple of that slack is the euro­zone’s very high unem­ploy­ment rate, which is more than dou­ble its U.S. equiv­a­lent.

    Fig­ures released Wednes­day appear to jus­ti­fy their cau­tion. The Euro­pean Union’s sta­tis­tics agency said con­sumer prices were 1.4% high­er in May than a year ear­li­er, a decline in the infla­tion rate from 1.9% in April, when it was in line with the ECB’s tar­get. That is the low­est infla­tion rate record­ed this year, and below the 1.5% fore­cast by econ­o­mists.

    The ECB’s gov­ern­ing coun­cil announces its next pol­i­cy deci­sion on June 8. Speak­ing to EU law­mak­ers Mon­day, ECB Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi strong­ly sig­naled that there will be no change in pol­i­cy.

    ...

    Instead of respond­ing to the head­line mea­sure, the ECB has been plac­ing greater empha­sis on what it calls “under­ly­ing infla­tion,” which it has­n’t defined clear­ly but which is close to the mea­sure of core infla­tion that excludes ener­gy and food, prices for which are deter­mined at a glob­al lev­el rather than by changes in euro­zone demand. The core mea­sure of infla­tion fell to 0.9% in May from 1.2% in April.

    In par­tic­u­lar, the ECB has homed in on wages as a key fac­tor in deter­min­ing when it will be com­fort­able with eas­ing back on its stim­u­lus mea­sures. Falling unem­ploy­ment should help raise wages, and Euro­stat Wednes­day said the num­ber of work­ers with­out jobs fell by 233,000 in April, leav­ing the job­less rate at 9.3%, the low­est since March 2009.

    How­ev­er, ECB pol­i­cy mak­ers have recent­ly said slack in the jobs mar­ket goes beyond mea­sured unem­ploy­ment, and includes peo­ple who want to work more hours, and move from tem­po­rary to full-time con­tracts. In a speech ear­li­er this month, ECB exec­u­tive board mem­ber Benoît Cœuré cit­ed fig­ures show­ing that there are more than 7 mil­lion “under­em­ployed part-time work­ers” in the euro­zone, a fact that “may have impor­tant impli­ca­tions for infla­tion dynam­ics.”

    As a result, nei­ther the ECB nor many oth­er econ­o­mists expect falling unem­ploy­ment to quick­ly deliv­er a boost to wages of the scale need­ed to ensure infla­tion stays around the tar­get rate of just below 2%.

    “While the unem­ploy­ment rate is falling, per­sis­tent­ly weak labor mar­kets will like­ly lim­it wage growth in the region, which will keep core infla­tion rel­a­tive­ly sub­dued,” said rat­ings firm Moody’s Investors Ser­vice in its lat­est glob­al eco­nom­ic out­look, which was pub­lished Wednes­day.

    How­ev­er, the fall in infla­tion is unlike­ly to end crit­i­cism of the cen­tral bank from parts of North­ern Europe. The cen­tral bank’s crit­ics don’t gen­er­al­ly ques­tion its analy­sis of the jobs mar­ket and under­ly­ing infla­tion. Instead, they argue that savers are being unfair­ly penal­ized by low inter­est rates, and that the low inter­est rates on gov­ern­ment bonds that result from the ECB’s poli­cies take the pres­sure off south­ern Euro­pean politi­cians to enact need­ed eco­nom­ic over­hauls.

    ———-

    “Infla­tion drop like­ly to keep ECB cau­tious on QE” by Paul Han­non; Mar­ket­Watch; 05/31/2017

    In par­tic­u­lar, the ECB has homed in on wages as a key fac­tor in deter­min­ing when it will be com­fort­able with eas­ing back on its stim­u­lus mea­sures. Falling unem­ploy­ment should help raise wages, and Euro­stat Wednes­day said the num­ber of work­ers with­out jobs fell by 233,000 in April, leav­ing the job­less rate at 9.3%, the low­est since March 2009.”

    In case you were curi­ous, yes, the head of the Bun­des­bank and Ger­many’s ECB board mem­ber both called on the ECB to wrap up the QE pro­gram soon the day after the above report. Which is bare­ly news since they do that all the time. But at least it sounds like they aren’t being lis­tened too by the bulk of the ECB’s pol­i­cy-mak­ers. At least let’s hope that’s the case. Because oth­er­wise we could eas­i­ly see an ear­ly end to a QE pro­gram before we’ve seen an end to the severe­ly-depressed eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tions found across the euro­zone. Tying wage growth to the QE pro­gram is very good news in this sit­u­a­tion:

    ...
    How­ev­er, ECB pol­i­cy mak­ers have recent­ly said slack in the jobs mar­ket goes beyond mea­sured unem­ploy­ment, and includes peo­ple who want to work more hours, and move from tem­po­rary to full-time con­tracts. In a speech ear­li­er this month, ECB exec­u­tive board mem­ber Benoît Cœuré cit­ed fig­ures show­ing that there are more than 7 mil­lion “under­em­ployed part-time work­ers” in the euro­zone, a fact that “may have impor­tant impli­ca­tions for infla­tion dynam­ics.”

    As a result, nei­ther the ECB nor many oth­er econ­o­mists expect falling unem­ploy­ment to quick­ly deliv­er a boost to wages of the scale need­ed to ensure infla­tion stays around the tar­get rate of just below 2%.
    ...

    “In a speech ear­li­er this month, ECB exec­u­tive board mem­ber Benoît Cœuré cit­ed fig­ures show­ing that there are more than 7 mil­lion “under­em­ployed part-time work­ers” in the euro­zone, a fact that “may have impor­tant impli­ca­tions for infla­tion dynam­ics.””

    Yep, even if unem­ploy­ment falls sig­nif­i­cant­ly in euro­zone mem­bers states like Spain or Por­tu­gal, there’s still no rea­son to assume infla­tion we rise sig­nif­i­cant­ly. But it could rise is placed like Ger­many. So a gen­er­al bias is required and a bias that pri­or­i­tizes wage growth and “core” infla­tion over head­line infla­tion is a step in the right direc­tion.

    Although all of that assumes that we don’t see a pre­ma­ture end to the QE pro­gram based on a tech­ni­cal­i­ty. Specif­i­cal­ly, the tech­ni­cal­i­ty that Ger­many is run­ning out of bonds for the Bun­des­bank to buy as its share of the QE pro­gram. And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, this tech­ni­cal­i­ty could be eas­i­ly addressed giv­en the flex­i­bil­i­ty the ECB has already demon­strat­ed when it, for instance, decid­ed to pur­chase few­er Por­tuguese bonds in order to avoid break­ing the rule that the ECB can’t hold more than a third of a nation’s bonds. If the ECB needs to come up with an excep­tion to its rules in the case of a lack of Ger­man bonds to buy that appears to be part of the rules. But the fact that Ger­many is run­ning out of bonds means there’s going to be a “what do we do to keep the QE func­tion­ing now that Ger­many is run­ning out of bonds” con­ver­sa­tion com­ing up soon. And as the arti­cle also points out, it’s still pos­si­ble the lack of Ger­man bonds could tip the scales in favor of wrap­ping up the QE soon, and hat means the lack of Ger­man bonds could be the cat­a­lyst for the pre­ma­ture end­ing of the QE pro­gram whether or not there’s mean­ing­ful euro­zone wage growth. All based on a tech­ni­cal­i­ty the the ECB could eas­i­ly address:

    Reuters

    Ger­man bond scarci­ty could tip the ECB taper debate, data sug­gests

    * Ana­lysts- ECB bought less Ger­man debt than rules allow in April

    * Aver­age matu­ri­ty of Ger­man bonds pur­chased for ECB QE falls

    * Sign of scarci­ty of eli­gi­ble Ger­man debt

    * Ger­man bond scarci­ty may pro­vide incen­tive for ECB taper

    * Graph­ic: reut.rs/2puNpq2

    By Dhara Ranas­inghe
    Tue May 9, 2017 | 11:11am EDT

    LONDON, May 9 As fad­ing polit­i­cal risks and a stronger econ­o­my fuel talk that the ECB may scale back its mas­sive mon­e­tary stim­u­lus, ana­lysts say data high­light­ing a scarci­ty of eli­gi­ble Ger­man bonds for pur­chase under the scheme could help sway the debate.

    Based on ECB bond-buy­ing data pub­lished last week, some ana­lysts cal­cu­late that the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank bought rough­ly 400 mil­lion euros few­er bonds in Ger­many in April than its rules allow.

    These fig­ures exclude oth­er than gov­ern­ment debt and adjust Ger­many’s tar­get to strip out Greece, which is not eli­gi­ble for the 2.3 tril­lion euro ($2.5 tril­lion) scheme.

    The short­fall rais­es ques­tions about how close the ECB is to hit­ting its bond-buy­ing lim­its in Ger­many, the euro zone’s bench­mark issuer and the biggest source of bonds under the scheme.

    It also comes as investors shift their focus to a poten­tial grad­ual reduc­tion, or “taper­ing”, of the ECB’s quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing (QE) pro­gramme and to U.S. Fed­er­al Reserve rate hikes now that polit­i­cal risks linked to France’s elec­tions are fad­ing.

    “It was by far the largest devi­a­tion, at least for Ger­many, and for me sug­gests that on top of the polit­i­cal stress and smooth­ing of pur­chas­es, there are scarci­ty con­straints for the Bun­des­bank,” said Pictet Wealth Man­age­ment senior econ­o­mist Fred­erik Ducrozet.

    “What it means is that the ECB has to be very cau­tious with its exit and if they don’t taper with­in less than six months (of end­ing the pro­gramme) some­thing might have to give. That’s where the data for April is so inter­est­ing.”

    The stim­u­lus pro­gramme is due to run until the end of 2017.

    Bank cal­cu­la­tions based on the data also show that in just six months, the aver­age matu­ri­ty of month­ly Ger­man debt pur­chas­es by the ECB has dropped to under five years from more than 10.

    That sug­gests a short­age of longer-dat­ed eli­gi­ble debt is forc­ing Ger­many’s Bun­des­bank, which acts on behalf of the ECB, to take advan­tage of recent rule tweaks to buy more short­er-dat­ed bonds.

    While that shift was expect­ed after a change allow­ing the ECB to buy bonds yield­ing less than the minus 0.40 per­cent depo rate, the speed at which the Bun­des­bank put that to use has tak­en mar­kets by sur­prise.

    TIME TO TAPER?

    ECB asset pur­chas­es are based on the so-called cap­i­tal key — it buys a coun­try’s bonds in line with the size of its econ­o­my — mak­ing Ger­many the biggest source for the scheme.

    Many banks expect the ECB to push up against a self-imposed lim­it that pre­vents it from hold­ing more than 33 per­cent of a coun­try’s eli­gi­ble bonds around year-end.

    In real­i­ty, the cen­tral bank can be flex­i­ble and smooth out its pur­chas­es and in the past it has shown it can get around tech­ni­cal hur­dles.

    The ECB has already devi­at­ed from the cap­i­tal key in Ire­land and Por­tu­gal, where it is run­ning out of bonds to buy.

    “The devi­a­tions else­where have been con­sis­tent except for Ger­many,” said ABN AMRO senior fixed income ana­lyst Kim Liu.

    He also esti­mat­ed the ECB devi­at­ed from the cap­i­tal key in Ger­many by around 400 mil­lion euros in April when exclud­ing cor­po­rate and cov­ered bond pur­chas­es and adjust­ing for Greece.

    Liu said the aver­age matu­ri­ty of month­ly Ger­man pur­chas­es, which ABN and oth­ers cal­cu­late at 4.72 years for April, is also some­thing to watch care­ful­ly.

    “This means that the aver­age matu­ri­ty of month­ly Ger­man pur­chas­es remains much low­er than those of oth­er coun­tries and that the Bun­des­bank con­tin­u­ous­ly is forced to buy short-dat­ed bonds with yields that are below the ECB’s deposit rate,” he said.

    The bond scarci­ty in Ger­many shows that the ECB would strug­gle to extend the scheme with­out fur­ther changes to its own bond-buy­ing rules.

    ...

    ECB month­ly asset pur­chas­es fell by 20 bil­lion euros to 60 bil­lion euros in April, while mon­ey mar­kets price in rough­ly a 70 per­cent chance of a rate hike in ear­ly 2018.

    “The ECB can always get around its rules, it has the flex­i­bil­i­ty on whether to buy cen­tral gov­ern­ment or local gov­ern­ment or agency debt to ful­fill its quo­tas,” said Marchel Alexan­drovich, senior Euro­pean econ­o­mist at Jef­feries.

    “But the longer QE goes on, the more the ECB will have to think about chang­ing the rules again ... And the issue now is the will­ing­ness to car­ry on with QE.”

    ———-

    “Ger­man bond scarci­ty could tip the ECB taper debate, data sug­gests” by Dhara Ranas­inghe; Reuters; 05/09/2017

    “The short­fall rais­es ques­tions about how close the ECB is to hit­ting its bond-buy­ing lim­its in Ger­many, the euro zone’s bench­mark issuer and the biggest source of bonds under the scheme.”

    And it sounds like we’re going to get an answer as to whether or not there’s a short­fall in Ger­man bonds avail­able for the Bun­des­bank to pur­chase each month to ful­fill Ger­many’s share of the “cap­i­tal key”. Maybe in the next six months unless the ECB scales back the pro­gram before then which would just buy a lit­tle time:

    ...
    “What it means is that the ECB has to be very cau­tious with its exit and if they don’t taper with­in less than six months (of end­ing the pro­gramme) some­thing might have to give. That’s where the data for April is so inter­est­ing.”

    ...

    TIME TO TAPER?

    ECB asset pur­chas­es are based on the so-called cap­i­tal key — it buys a coun­try’s bonds in line with the size of its econ­o­my — mak­ing Ger­many the biggest source for the scheme.

    Many banks expect the ECB to push up against a self-imposed lim­it that pre­vents it from hold­ing more than 33 per­cent of a coun­try’s eli­gi­ble bonds around year-end.

    In real­i­ty, the cen­tral bank can be flex­i­ble and smooth out its pur­chas­es and in the past it has shown it can get around tech­ni­cal hur­dles.

    The ECB has already devi­at­ed from the cap­i­tal key in Ire­land and Por­tu­gal, where it is run­ning out of bonds to buy.

    “The devi­a­tions else­where have been con­sis­tent except for Ger­many,” said ABN AMRO senior fixed income ana­lyst Kim Liu.

    He also esti­mat­ed the ECB devi­at­ed from the cap­i­tal key in Ger­many by around 400 mil­lion euros in April when exclud­ing cor­po­rate and cov­ered bond pur­chas­es and adjust­ing for Greece.
    ...

    Recall that for Por­tu­gal the QE rule it was threat­en­ing to break was the 33 per­cent cap on a nation’s bond sov­er­eign mar­kets that can be held in total for the ECB’s stim­u­lus pro­grams. And the solu­tion they found was to force Por­tu­gal to buy less than its cap­i­tal key share each month. So if Ger­many can’t find enough bonds to ful­fill its month­ly cap­i­tal key share, just buy­ing less than that share is an estab­lished prece­dent. And recent­ly estab­lished.

    Also don’t for­get how the ECB already tweaked its rules for Ger­many when it low­ered the min­i­mum inter­est rate on the bonds that could be pur­chased for the QE pro­gram after Ger­many shift­ed to buy­ing short­er-dat­ed bonds with ultra-low rates in order to ful­fill its cap­i­tal keys share.

    So is Ger­many going to demand an end to the QE pro­gram if it can’t find enough bonds to ful­fill its “cap­i­tal key” share of the month­ly QE bond pur­chas­es or is it going to buy less than its cap­i­tal key share? We’ll see. But if Ger­many’s bond short­age leads to a pre­ma­ture end to the QE pro­gram due to a sud­den inflex­i­bil­i­ty in the ECB’s rules, that’s prob­a­bly going to piss off a lot of its fel­low euro­zone mem­ber states. Espe­cial­ly Por­tu­gal, which is already pur­chas­ing only half of its cap­i­tal keys share in order to avoid break­ing the ’33 per­cent’ rule and already fret­ting about a pre­ma­ture and sud­den death of QE lead­ing to an bond mar­ket “cliff event”:

    Reuters

    Por­tu­gal debt agency offi­cial says wor­ried about liq­uid­i­ty, QE exit

    By John Ged­die and Padra­ic Halpin | DUBLIN
    Sat May 13, 2017 | 8:13am EDT

    A senior offi­cial at the Por­tuguese debt agency said on Sat­ur­day he was wor­ried about liq­uid­i­ty in the coun­try’s bond mar­kets and how the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank will with­draw its asset-pur­chase stim­u­lus scheme.

    José Car­doso Cos­ta, the head of research and report­ing unit of the IGCP, added that the cen­tral bank’s month­ly pur­chas­es of gov­ern­ment bonds under quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing (QE) are now less than half of what they start­ed at because of the scheme’s self-imposed lim­its.

    The ECB has com­mit­ted to buy­ing 60 bil­lion euros worth of bonds every month until Decem­ber, but many ana­lysts expect pol­i­cy­mak­ers to sig­nal a wind down of pur­chas­es lat­er this year.

    “When will it (QE) end, our wor­ry maybe is how it will end? We cer­tain­ly don’t want this to end with cliff effects or any­thing of the sort, we want this to be as smooth as pos­si­ble,” Cos­ta said at an indus­try event in Dublin.

    Par­tic­u­lar­ly in Portugal...the mar­ket has evi­dence that it has very low liq­uid­i­ty these days. It is hard to assess whether this comes from the impact of PSPP (Pub­lic Sec­tor Pur­chase Pro­gram) itself...we have seen a num­ber of events of exces­sive volatil­i­ty that arise from this lack of liq­uid­i­ty so we are wor­ried about that.”

    In Por­tu­gal as well as oth­er coun­tries such as Ire­land, vol­umes of month­ly cen­tral bank pur­chas­es have recent­ly not met the ECB’s cap­i­tal key weight­ing based on the size of each coun­try’s econ­o­my. This is because of lim­its on the amount of each coun­try’s debt and indi­vid­ual bonds it can hold.

    “The ECB has reduced pur­chas­es on Por­tuguese debt because of the con­straints it has set so they are now buy­ing less than half of what they would be accord­ing to the cap­i­tal key. We have seen that this had an impact on our mar­ket last year, but I believe the ECB is being able to do this in a smooth way but it is some­thing that may wor­ry us.”

    ...

    The ECB has reduced pur­chas­es on Por­tuguese debt because of the con­straints it has set so they are now buy­ing less than half of what they would be accord­ing to the cap­i­tal key. We have seen that this had an impact on our mar­ket last year, but I believe the ECB is being able to do this in a smooth way but it is some­thing that may wor­ry us.”

    Por­tu­gal, which is get­ting less than half of its cap­i­tal key share to avoid break­ing the ’33 per­cent’ rule, has already shown quite a bit of ‘flex­i­bil­i­ty’ when the ECB’s var­i­ous rules came into con­flict. Will Ger­many? We’ll find out prob­a­bly by the end of the year. But if the QE comes to an end too soon, a whole new round of euro­zone crises could fol­low short­ly. Quite pos­si­bly start­ing with Por­tu­gal if ther fears of the Por­tuguese cen­tral bank is found­ed:

    ...
    “When will it (QE) end, our wor­ry maybe is how it will end? We cer­tain­ly don’t want this to end with cliff effects or any­thing of the sort, we want this to be as smooth as pos­si­ble,” Cos­ta said at an indus­try event in Dublin.
    ...

    Things could be get­ting dicey for Por­tu­gal. That’s the mes­sage from all the uncer­tain­ty over whether or not the ECB is going to be taper­ing away the QE pro­gram soon.

    But as bad as things are for Por­tu­gal dur­ing this del­i­cate peri­od, per­haps the prize for poten­tial dis­as­ter should go to Italy. At least if this recent analy­sis from bond giant Pim­co — owned by Ger­man insur­ance giant Allianz — is accu­rate. Because Pim­co just warned that the bor­row­ing shock cre­at­ed by a swift end to the QE pro­gram could swift­ly throw Italy into a ‘bailout’ pro­gram (of aus­ter­i­ty and doom) which could bring about a swift end to Italy’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the euro­zone:

    The Tele­graph

    Italy faces bor­row­ing shock when ECB removes sup­port, warns Pim­co

    Szu Ping Chan

    4 June 2017 • 7:06pm

    ITALY faces a “hor­ror” sce­nario when the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank winds down its bond buy­ing pro­gramme in a move that risks spark­ing a surge in the country’s bor­row­ing costs, accord­ing to one of the world’s largest bond man­agers.

    The Pacif­ic Invest­ment Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny (Pim­co) said the ECB’s €60bn (£53bn)-a-month quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing (QE) pro­gramme was “very sup­port­ive” for coun­tries such as Italy and Por­tu­gal and had helped to lim­it volatil­i­ty in these coun­tries.

    Andrew Balls, chief invest­ment offi­cer for glob­al fixed income, said remov­ing that sup­port was like­ly to push up bond yields in a coun­try that has strug­gled to imple­ment reforms and reduce its mas­sive debt pile amid weak growth.

    Ital­ian 10-year bench­mark bor­row­ing costs cur­rent­ly stand at around 2.2pc, com­pared with 0.2pc in Ger­many and close to 3pc in Por­tu­gal.

    Mr Balls said fund­ing Italy at these rates “doesn’t look par­tic­u­lar­ly attrac­tive” con­sid­er­ing the risks fac­ing the eurozone’s third largest econ­o­my.

    He said removal of ECB sup­port raised the risk that Italy could be forced into a bail-out pro­gramme if its bor­row­ing costs rose to unsus­tain­able lev­els, even though the coun­try has long lived with­in its means exclud­ing debt inter­est costs.

    “The thing which fills me with hor­ror is an envi­ron­ment where the ECB has fin­ished QE, Italy does need sup­port, and the mes­sage is you need to go to the Euro­pean Sta­bil­i­ty Mech­a­nism [the eurozone’s bail-out fund],” said Mr Balls.

    “Replay­ing the events of a few years ago with Por­tu­gal, Greece and oth­ers in the case of Italy would be an event that would raise an awful lot of risk — and you’d want to get paid a lot more than a 2pc return over 10 years to take that risk.”

    While Pim­co believes an Ital­ian exit from the euro­zone is “not our base­line”, Mr Balls added: “It doesn’t seem ter­ri­bly unlike­ly either”.

    “Italy can’t grow,” he said. “You have lim­it­ed polit­i­cal will to imple­ment reform ...In con­trast to Por­tu­gal it’s big and sys­temic, but its not clear how Italy improves the sit­u­a­tion.

    “In the event of a reces­sion or shock it’s not clear how the pol­i­cy appa­ra­tus deals with some­thing as large as Italy.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Italy faces bor­row­ing shock when ECB removes sup­port, warns Pim­co” by Szu Ping Chan; The Tele­graph 06/04/2017

    He said removal of ECB sup­port raised the risk that Italy could be forced into a bail-out pro­gramme if its bor­row­ing costs rose to unsus­tain­able lev­els, even though the coun­try has long lived with­in its means exclud­ing debt inter­est costs.

    That’s how Pim­co sees Italy’s sit­u­a­tion: it’s one inter­est rate shock away from a ‘bailout’ sit­u­a­tion. Italy nev­er real­ly got the Troikan treat­ment. But it just might if the QE unrav­els abrupt­ly. Which is why an ‘Italex­it’ should­n’t be con­sid­ered “ter­ri­bly unlike­ly” at the moment:

    ...
    While Pim­co believes an Ital­ian exit from the euro­zone is “not our base­line”, Mr Balls added: “It doesn’t seem ter­ri­bly unlike­ly either”.
    ...

    So how many oth­er euro­zone mem­bers are just an inter­est rate shock away from ‘bailout’ time? It’s a rather loom­ing ques­tion that looms ever more gloomi­ly the more we hear Ger­many’s offi­cials call for a rapid end of QE. And since the QE pro­gram might have to be employed for years to come if the euro­zone is going to climb its way out of its funk with­out a “shock” and pre­ma­ture stran­gu­la­tion of periph­ery economies, the reports that Angela Merkel and Wolf­gang Schaeu­ble are already jock­ey­ing to have Bun­des­bank chief Jens Wei­d­man replace ECB chief Mario Draghi at the end of his term in 2019 are a reminder that these gloomy loomy ques­tions are going to be poten­tial­ly asked for for years to come. Unless QE real­ly does end in the next year like Jens Wei­d­mann recent­ly said he would like to see hap­pen, at which point the new gloomy loom­ing ques­tion will be which euro­zone mem­ber will end up going to the ‘bailout’ box of doom first.

    It’s all a reminder that the US does­n’t have a monop­oly on self-destruc­tive impuls­es at the moment. Trump has com­pe­ti­tion. The euro­zone still might blow itself up, bit by bit, one self-inflict­ed eco­nom­ic cri­sis at a time. It’s not real­ly a high point for human­i­ty of late. At least, that’s not ter­ri­bly unthink­able at the moment.

    On the plus side, if there are any alien armadas wait­ing to attack human­i­ty they prob­a­bly aren’t going to both­er at this point. So there’s that. Lit­tle bits of good news every­where you look.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 4, 2017, 7:50 pm

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