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Sorting Out the Euro Mess - John Mauldin's Outside the Box E-Letter
“...And Now for the Good News
Now let us turn to the good news, at least for the Eurocrats and perhaps, in the short-term, for the European markets. The potential support from the ECB is the one part of the summit deal that could turn out to be much stronger than it seemed at first sight. While Mario Draghi's public statements were less than helpful, they were presumably directed at a German audience, as was Bundesbank president Jens Weidman's astonishing decision on Thursday to vote against even a -25bp rate cut. This seemed to confirm our longstanding view that, whatever the preferences of Angela Merkel and other politicians, the Bundesbank would like to sabotage the Euro if it can. Behind this macho posturing, however, the ECB may be moving towards a programme of sovereign debt monetisation and quantitative easing on a scale that even Ben Bernanke and Mervyn King would never contemplate.
The three-year unlimited liquidity operations announced last Thursday could provide infinite monetary support for European banks and through them, their sovereign debt markets. Once these three-year repos get started, banks in the Club Med countries will be able to borrow as much as they want from the ECB at 1% and use this money to buy government bonds now yielding 6% or more. Because of the unprecedented maturity of these repo-operations, banks will now be able to theoretically acquire unlimited government bond portfolios without exposing themselves to rollover or maturity risks. Banks will therefore be able to pick up 500bp of carry, with zero risk-weightings, by hoovering up all the debt their governments can throw at the markets. Of course there would be risks—we cannot say banks will want to jump on this deal, but in theory they can.
This Ponzi scheme could potentially result in an even bigger money-printing operation than anything the US, British and Swiss central banks have done on their own accounts. It would allow the banks to rebuild their equity with no dilution to shareholders. And if the banks in Italy or Greece became too "profitable" by using cheap ECB funding to buy up their entire sovereign debt markets, then the Italian or Greek governments could always recover the "excess" profits with special taxes. The governments could thus effectively reduce their own cost of funds to the 1% rate offered to banks by the ECB. Of course if the Italian government defaulted on its debts, Italian banks would go spectacularly bust. But these banks would go bust anyway if the Italian government ever defaulted. All the incentives for Italian bank management will therefore be to go for broke in their sovereign debt markets, making maximum use of the new ECB credit lines.
That said, however, the European Banking Authority's recent stress tests forced banks to assume mark-to-market losses in the stressed scenarios. These demands from the EBA may inhibit banks from adding more sovereign risk—unless the EBA uses the "fiscal compact" as an excuse to ease up on the stress tests.
And it is crucial to remember that banks are likely to use the ECB credit lines only to buy the bonds of their own national governments, partly in response to political pressures but also for prudential reasons. If the Euro were ever to break up, Unicredit would not want to own any Greek or Spanish debt, since this would entail unpredictable currency risks. An Italian bond, by contrast, would be redenominated into the new Lira and would be matched perfectly against Unicredit's borrowings from the Bank of Italy, which would also be redenominated into Lira.
Thus, the result of the ECB's covert QE via the banks will be gradually to re-nationalise the banking systems and the sovereign debt structures in Europe. This process will help Club Med countries avoid sovereign debt defaults, but it will make eventual breakup of the euro much less painful– and therefore more likely.”
欧州的危机暂时化解啦？ |
发表于 2011-12-14 19:38
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