Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

Europe’s Economic Crash Landing

Economics / Euro-Zone Nov 12, 2011 - 12:19 PM GMT

By: Mike_Whitney

Economics

Best Financial Markets Analysis Article“Italy is now mathematically beyond the point of no return.” –Barclays Capital

November 11, 2011 -- The situation in Europe gets more depressing by the day. Policymakers have waited too long and now events are beyond their control. The only way to avert a disorderly breakup and another Great Depression is by deploying the European Central Bank (ECB) to backstop the debt of the individual countries, and even that might not work. New ECB chief Mario Draghi must announce his intention to keep interest rates down regardless of the cost. Blanket guarantees are the only way to stop the bleeding. But acting as lender of last resort will not stop the contagion; it will merely minimize the damage. The dissolution of the eurozone is a foregone conclusion. It’s only a matter of time. Here’s an excerpt from an article by Edward Harrison over at Credit Writedowns:


“… it’s game over for the euro zone. The extend and pretend stuff ain’t gonna work…. if you are an investor, this is the moment of truth. Everything – every asset class – depends on how the euro zone performs in the Italian Job. There are only two outcomes, here. If Italy blows up, a Depression is upon us; banks would be insolvent, CDS triggers would implode the system, bank runs would begin, stock markets would crash, and you will would see sovereign debt yields go to unbelievable lows for nations with a lender of last resort.” (“Italy, Italy, Italy”, Edward Harrison, Credit Writedowns)

Yields on Italian debt are soaring while overall economic conditions continue to deteriorate. The eurozone is sliding fast into recession if it isn’t in one already. The EU’s ill-considered austerity measures have increased deflationary pressures and slowed growth. Credit is shrinking while bank balance sheets dip deeper into the red. This is why the ECB intervened in Thursday’s auction of Italian and Spanish debt and loaded up on both hoping to calm the markets and stop the panic. This is from Reuters:

“Traders said the European Central Bank increased its bond buying, but the ECB’s hard-line chief economist told regional governments not to expect the bank to rescue them with unlimited funds.

A sale on Italian debt went smoothly, but worries persisted that Italy’s borrowing costs were unsustainable. The pullback in yields helped support market sentiment.” (Reuters)

Stocks rose on the news that the ECB would announce more bond purchases in a press statement later on Thursday, but expectations are probably too high. Demand has dropped off sharply while the rout continues apace. This is from Der Spiegel:

“Run for your lives” is the new motto in Europe, and not just among banks and insurance companies, which are selling off southern European bonds as quickly as they can, but also among ordinary holders of savings accounts. Banks and regulatory agencies are noticing that anxious citizens throughout Europe are trying to bring their money to safety. The flight of capital from Italy, Spain and Greece is in full swing.

Aside from the ECB, there are no longer many buyers of Italian treasury bonds. It is clear that most investors are trying to reduce their inventories — if they can find someone to take the paper off their hands. It is almost as if buyers were boycotting Italian bonds. (‘Run For Your Lives’; Euro Zone Considers Solution of Last Resort, Der Spiegel)

The ECB has been playing cat-and-mouse with its bond purchases, waiting for the Italian parliament to signal it would pass economic reforms on pensions and labor. These punitive reforms will be pushed through by the man who will likely replace deposed PM Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti, who was formerly the European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission and a member of the Bilderberg Group.

Berlusconi’s abdication has had no noticeable effect on the markets nor has the so-called “breakthrough” agreement that was announced more than 2 weeks ago in Brussels. The plan called for the establishment of a $1 trillion eurozone financial emergency fund (EFSF) to address problems that flare up like the Italian bond crisis. As expected, there’s a good deal of disagreement about how the fund should be implemented or from where the resources will come. So far, the only country to purchase bonds from the EFSF has been Japan, and they’ve already lost money on the deal. That’s not an encouraging sign for a fund that is supposed to save the eurozone.

Imagine if Henry Paulson–instead of nationalizing Fannie and Freddie when they were about to blow–had decided to set up a structured investment vehicle funded by issuing bonds to China that would cover 20 per cent first-loss provision on Fannie mortgage-backed securities. Do you think investors still would have held on to their Fannie bonds? No way. There would have been a run on the bank. And yet, this absurd invention is the Eurocrats’ solution to the crisis.

The reason that investors are ditching Italian debt is not because of Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio (which is currently 120 percent.) No, it’s much simpler than that. Investors purchase government bonds because they believe they are risk-free. Now, however, they’ve discovered that Italian bonds are not risk free, in fact, a default could mean that they would retrieve very little of their original outlay. So, why buy them?

The problem is easy to fix. It’s just a matter of allowing the ECB to act as guarantor of the debt of the individual states. (which is what the Fed did for the entire financial system after Lehman collapsed) But the ECB doesn’t want this power because it would preclude the bank from imposing its austerity regime on the member-states while claiming it has no choice to act otherwise. As it stands, the ECB is the perfect tool for spreading neoliberalism throughout the eurozone, and that is precisely what it’s doing.

What’s remarkable about the “debt crisis” is that it was entirely predictable. Many economists warned from the very onset that the monetary union was structurally flawed and wouldn’t work without greater political and fiscal integration. Many critics, like Wynne Godley, focused on the eurozone’s absence of a lender of last resort. Here’s how he summed it up back in 1992:

“If a government does not have its own central bank on which it can draw cheques freely, its expenditures can be financed only by borrowing in the open market in competition with businesses, and this may prove excessively expensive or even impossible, particularly under conditions of extreme emergency….The danger then, is that the budgetary restraint to which governments are individually committed will impart a disinflationary bias that locks Europe as a whole into a depression it is powerless to lift.” (“The Greatest Prediction of the last 20 Years,” Pragmatic Capitalism)

Indeed. Italy and the other countries are in dire straits because they do not control their own currency and, thus, cannot control their own fate. They are entirely at the mercy of the ECB. Is it any wonder why restructuring is never seriously considered (because it would cost the banks and bondholders money) or why there’s been no attempt to create a stimulus program that will lift the struggling states in the south out of their slump and back into the black? The ECB refuses to use the tools that are available to it because its overall policy objectives are already being achieved. Internal devaluation and belt-tightening are the path to privatization, fewer social services, and cheaper labor, exactly what the bankers want.

So, where is all this headed?

I’ll let The Economist have the last word. This is from an article by Ryan Avent in the current issue titled “Finito?”:

“I have been examining and re-examining the situation, trying to find the potential happy ending. It isn’t there. The euro zone is in a death spiral. Markets are abandoning the periphery, including Italy, which is the world’s eighth largest economy and third largest bond market. This is triggering margin calls and leading banks to pull credit from the European market. This, in turn, is damaging the European economy, which is already being squeezed by the austerity programmes adopted in every large euro-zone economy. A weakening economy will damage revenues, undermining efforts at fiscal consolidation, further driving away investors and potentially triggering more austerity. The cycle will continue until something breaks. Eventually, one economy or another will face a true bank run and severe capital flight and will be forced to adopt capital controls. At that point, it will effectively be out of the euro area. What happens next isn’t clear, but it’s unlikely to be pretty.” (“Finito?, The Economist)

The chances of the eurozone surviving in its present form are slim to none.

Email: fergiewhitney@msn.com

Mike is a well respected freelance writer living in Washington state, interested in politics and economics from a libertarian perspective.

© 2011 Copyright Mike Whitney - All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis.
Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

Mike Whitney Archive

© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Comments

Pete
13 Nov 11, 17:45
The US $ is next

As soon as bond investors figure out(or admit) that the US can't make good on its Treasury Bonds, it'll be "Game Over" here as well.

I was around to see the 30 year Treasury with a coupon of 14% in the early 80's.

I'm betting I'll see it get there again.

"Hairball"

Whitefish, MT


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in