Tag: Troika

Greece: What should its creditors do now?

Following Sunday’s NO vote in Greece, what ever that might have meant, it is tempting to tell Greece to get lost and be done with them. Aside from the unseemly lack of compassion for our suffering fellow man, the further collapse of the Greek economy and society that would likely follow Grexit (the Greek exit from the Euro and introduction of its own currency) would open unknown and potentially very dangerous risks to the rest of Europe from its southern periphery. However, any new deal between Greece and its creditors should be mutually beneficial for Greece and the EU in the long run and achievable and practical in the short run. What are the key elements needed for such an agreement?

Greece’s second bailout program with its creditors (the EU, ECB, and IMF) expired June 30 after a four-month extension without disbursing the final installment of around $8 billion dollars. It cannot be resurrected. Thus any further discussions between Greece and its creditors will concern a third bailout program.

Greece’s recently replaced and unmissed Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis’, stock speech said basically that Greece does not need or want more loans because it is bankrupt rather than illiquid. In short, it wants debt forgiveness. In fact, many European officials have acknowledged the possible need to write off (reduce the present value one way or another of) existing Greek debt but insisted that any such consideration be put off for a new program. Discussion of a new program has now arrived.

The foundation of any financial assistance program with the IMF is its assessment that the borrowing country can repay the loan. This assessment is contained in the IMF’s “Debt Sustainability Analysis.” This analysis imbeds the agreed (or assumed) level of government spending and estimated tax and other government revenue and of the level of economic activity (GDP growth) upon which it depends in a forecasting model of the deficit and debt/GDP ratios expected from implementation of the agreed policies. The IMF was badly embarrassed by its acceptance of overly optimistic assumptions about income growth government revenue in its first bailout program in 2010 with the EU and ECB. Under political pressure from the EU and ECB, these assumptions allowed the IMF to conclude that Greece’s debt would be sustainable thus avoiding the need for some debt write off favored by the IMF but opposed by Germany and France, whose banks held large amounts of that debt. The second bailout program included a write off of about 70% of the privately held Greek debt. However, this came too late and the adjustment in the Greek government’s annual deficits required by the first program proved too severe causing a much larger and longer lasting contraction in the Greek economy than expected and assumed in the IMF Debt Sustainability Analysis at that time.

On June 26, 2015 (i.e. prior to Greece’s default on its $1.7 billion payment to the IMF and to the July 5 referendum) the IMF released a draft Debt Sustainability Analysis based on the information available at that time. It concluded that “If the program had been implemented as assumed, no further debt relief would have been needed under the agreed November 2012 framework…. At the last review in May 2014, Greece’s public debt was assessed to be getting back on a path toward sustainability, though it remained highly vulnerable to shocks. By late summer 2014, with interest rates having declined further, it appeared that no further debt relief would have been needed under the November 2012 framework, if the program were to have been implemented as agreed. But significant changes in policies since then—not least, lower primary surpluses and a weak reform effort that will weigh on growth and privatization—are leading to substantial new financing needs. Coming on top of the very high existing debt, these new financing needs render the debt dynamics unsustainable…. But if the package of reforms under consideration is weakened further—in particular, through a further lowering of primary surplus targets and even weaker structural reforms—haircuts on debt will become necessary.”

In short, the Greek economy was finally beginning to recover by the end of 2014 but the reversals by the new Syriza government of some of the policies contributing to that gain and the loss of market confidence in the muddled and amateurish behavior of the new government reversed the recovery and further increased Greek deficits. In addition, increasing capital flight has been financed by short-term emergency liquidity loans from the ECB, thus adding to Greece’s over all indebtedness. Capital flight per se should not reduce banks’ capital, as they lose the same amount of assets and liabilities, as long as they are able to liquidate sufficient assets by selling them or by using them as collateral for loans from the ECB or other banks. These loans and the process of transferring Euros abroad are described in the paper I presented in Athens May 19 at the Emergency Economic Summit for Greece: http://works.bepress.com/warren_coats/32/.

Under these circumstances it would be desirable (i.e. consistent with and/or required by a European desire to keep Greece in the Euro Zone while returning it to fiscal balance and sustainability over a reasonable, if somewhat longer, period of time) for Greece’s creditors to forgive some of the debt held by the ECB and IMF and to lower the structural fiscal surpluses initially required in a follow on program for the next few years (this latter element had already been offered by the creditors before the referendum). In short, by reducing Greece’s debt service payments and lowering its primary fiscal surplus, it would endure less “austerity.” Former Finance Minister Varoufakis actually proposed a sensible risk sharing form of refinanced Greek debt indexed to the economy’s economic performance. Creditors would do better than expected on their concessional loans if the economy performed better than forecast and would suffer losses if it did worse. This would give both sides a financial incentive to get the pace and balance of fiscal adjustment right (growth maximizing). While Europe’s political leaders sort out the details, the ECB should continue to provide liquidity credit to the extent that, and as long as, Greek banks can provide realistically valued collateral.

The purpose of these adjustments by the creditors should not and must not be to throw more good money after bad allowing a continuation of decades of corruption, rent seeking and government inefficiency. Long before it joined the Euro Zone, Greece suffered poor government services by a bureaucracy overstaffed by friends and supporters of the government in power at the time. Not receiving expected government services, many Greeks have decided not to pay for what they are not getting. Hence tax evasion and a large underground economy added to Greece’s deficits. Quoting from Bret Stephens’ July 6 column: “Greeks retire earlier and live longer than most of their eurozone peers, which means they spend close to 18% of GDP on public pensions, compared with about 7% in Ireland and 5% in the U.S…. As of 2010, Greek labor costs were 25% higher than in Germany. [As a result of internal devaluation since then, this is no longer true.] A liter of milk in Greece costs 30% more than elsewhere in Europe, thanks to regulations that allow it to remain on the shelf for no more than a week. Pharmaceuticals are also more expensive, thanks to the cartelization of the economy…. Greece wanted to be prosperous without being competitive. It wanted to run a five-star welfare state with a two-star economy. It wanted modernity without efficiency or transparency, and wealth without work. It wanted control over its own destiny—while someone else picked up the check.”

Changing this behavior by Greek governments and the Greek public will not be easy if it is possible at all. The still very strong support by the Greek public for keeping the Euro suggests a strong awareness of the need for some restraints and discipline of its government’s spending. But is the desire for a truly better deal (from their own government) strong enough to overcome the resistance of the entrenched and favored interests, who would lose from liberalizing the economy and cleaning up the patronage mess and tax non compliance, etc.? The best hope is the formation of a unity government that strongly endorses a well balance program of gradual further fiscal adjustment and the continuation of the structural reforms so badly needed. Close monitoring by the creditors of Greek compliance with its promises and the phasing of financial assistance tied to such performance benchmarks, is the IMF’s standard approach to enforcing compliance with the measures the government agrees to. There are risks in agreeing to a third program and risks in not doing so and thus Grexit.

Grexit, even with total default on all external debt, will surely force more austerity on Greece than would any program now contemplated, even before taking account of the almost certain collapse of all of Greece’s already “temporarily” closed banks. The Greek government will hardly be in a position to bailout its banks suffering a surge of non-performing loans. Depositor bail-ins will need to cut all the way into “insured” deposits. The pain will be largely felt only in Greece, and unfortunately mostly by the ordinary Greek citizen.

Greece—how could they?

Today Greece is voting whether its government should accept the conditions required by the “Institutions” (EU/ECB/IMF) for the final installment of its second “bailout” package—a yes vote, or to reject them—a no vote. No one is quite sure what it all means. The program to which these conditions and the final installment of $8 billion applied expired on June 30 and those funds are no longer on offer. A yes vote would presumably indicate support by the majority of Greek voters for accepting the conditions (a modest primary budget surplus by the Greek government in coming years and structural reforms to improve the quality of government services and the productivity of Greece’s economy) likely to be offered for a third bailout program. The alternative—no more financial assistance from the Institutions—would force even greater “austerity” on the Greek government even after repudiating all of its external debt and thus saving the funds that it would otherwise needed to pay to service it. If Greek tax payers won’t cover the cost of the government’s promises and the market will no longer lend the shortfall, the government is likely to resort to augmenting its Euro tax income with IOU claims on Euros, i.e. introducing and inflating its own currency.

What were the Greek government and the Greek people thinking when they borrowed all that money in the first place, and it must be added, enjoyed spending it on an inflated, unsustainable lifestyle rather than investing it in a more productive future? But Greek politicians (and public) are hardly the only ones in the world to ignore future costs when making current promises they have no way to keep.

Take the United States, for example. For decades, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office has forecast ever-increasing deficits from American entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) as expenditures increasingly outstripped revenue. This reflects both the growth in the generosity of these programs and demographics (increasing life expectancy and the baby boomer bulge in retired people relative to those working to pay for them—anyone who still thinks that the retired are receiving what they paid in while working just hasn’t been paying attention). I have written about this from time to time such as four years ago in: https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/thinking-about-the-public-debt/

The future unsustainability of Social Security promises has been the subject of public debate for at least fifty years. The “future” retirement of the WWII baby boomers and their pension expectations has been known since the end of WWII. But one congress after the other has kicked the ball down the road. Seven years ago I outlined the issues and the relatively simple solutions to Social Security deficits in: https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/saving-social-security/ Since then Medicare and Medicaid promises have only increased.

President Obama established the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the so called Simpson-Bowles Commission) in early 2010 to develop bipartisan proposals for reducing future entitlement driven deficits. He ignored their modest proposals made in the Commission’s final report on December 1, 2010.

The Economist magazine last week reported that the assets available to cover U.S. public sector pensions covered only 75% of their obligations. In fact, the short fall is much greater than that because they are computed assuming a 7.6% return on their assets, which greatly overstates the actual experience of recent years. Private pensions are in much better shape. “But if public plans used the same discount rate as private ones, the deficit would increase to $3.9 trillion and the funding ratio fall to 45%.”

So what are our elected representatives thinking? “Deficits have eventually to be closed. That means lower benefits for the retired, bigger contributions from existing employees (a pay cut) or higher contributions from the employer—which means tax increases for state or city residents, or cuts to other services.

Why is it that our political representatives have such shorter policy horizons than does the public in general? The Economist provides a reasonable summary for the U.S..

“No wonder that no one is getting to grips with the problem. Unions do not like to draw attention to the deficits, for fear benefits will be cut. Politicians do not want to pick a fight with the unions, or increase taxes and annoy voters. Instead, states and cities tend to hope that rising markets will make the problem disappear.”

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21656202-betting-equities-has-not-eliminated-americas-pension-deficit-wishful-thinking?frsc=dg%7Ca

Emergency Economic Summit for Greece

I just returned from a conference in Athens on the Greek economy. Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s controversial Finance Minister, gave the (almost) final presentation to the 500 attendees making his usual point that Greece is insolvent not illiquid, meaning that its unsustainable debt should be written off (partially at least). While he is surely correct in that assessment, as usual he failed to discuss or even mention the structural reforms Greece needs to make to improve its productivity and thus lift its standard of living, which are also part of the conditions of the existing assistance program with the IMF/EU/ECB. He wants Greece’s creditors to forgive its debts first with reforms (which the new government says it wants to revers to some extent anyway) to come after. As past Greek behavior has destroyed any trust by its creditors and potential investors, the Troika (IMF/EU/ECB) is unlikely to agree to the Minister’s demands. The highlight of the conference was the critic of the Minister’s remarks by Nobel Prize economist Tom Sargent given immediately after and providing the actual concluding remarks for the day.

Here is an article on the conference that includes a short TV interview that I gave on the side.  http://fnf-europe.org/2015/05/20/fnf-greece-emergency-economic-summit-for-greece-stirs-up-unprecedented-media-coverage/

A video of the full conference and my presentation with be on the Atlas Network website later. https://www.atlasnetwork.org/news/article/how-greece-can-escape-from-economic-crisis?utm_source=AtlasNetwork+World10%3A+Highlights+from+the+global+freedom+movement&utm_campaign=a14b0b99fb-World10_5_6_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d4bce382cb-a14b0b99fb-26641201

The paper that I prepared for the conference can be found at: http://works.bepress.com/warren_coats/32/

All the best,

WarrenGreece EESG

Cyprus and the Euro

Does the Euro need to be supported by closer European fiscal integration? Many countries do just fine without their own currency and no fiscal coordination with their currency’s issuer. Panama has used the U.S. dollar for well over a century with good success. Ecuador and El Salvador have used the dollar as their own currency for a much shorter time and are doing better for it. Etc.

The major failing of the Euro, along with its considerable benefits for the Euro zone countries and those doing business or traveling among them, has been the failure of lenders to properly price the risk of lending to the Greece’s and Italy’s of the world. The spread between Greek government bonds over German government bonds collapsed to near parity after Greece replaced its inflation prone currency with the low inflation Euro. Greeks, both private and public, responded by borrowing with abandon. Greece has many other structural problems that keep its productivity lower than its neighbors, but credit markets indulged its borrowing binge on the assumption that there was little to no risk that the Greek government would be allowed to default on its debt.  This gave Greece the illusion of a higher standard of living for a while. Richer brothers to the north would surely step in and bail it out if it couldn’t repay its debts. And so it was for a while.

Against German resistance, Greece finally defaulted on much of its debt (the so-called voluntary haircut – write down — of its debt held by banks to about 30% of its full value). This was an important restoration of market risk and hence market discipline of Greek and other EU periphery countries’ borrowing. It will potentially help save the Euro. Most banks were able to absorb their resulting loss, but some big Cyprus banks apparently were not.

The EU/ECB/IMF (the troika) have offered conditional financial assistance to Cyprus but not to cover the cost of recapitalizing Cyprus’s underwater banks. Cyprus is required to raise those funds themselves. At least this is my assumption. Press reports on what the external support covers are almost totally lacking and the conditions for the deal are not yet final anyway. There is a relatively straightforward approach to resolving these banks, though the details would depend on the particulars of its banking and bankruptcy laws. I do not know the details of these laws nor of the conditions of these banks (Laiki and Bank of Cyprus), but I assume that they are viable if recapitalized and worth more as going concerns than from liquidating them.

The insolvent banks should be put into receivership and instantly split into a good, fully capitalized, bank and a bad bank (i.e. what ever is left) to be liquidated. The good banks would be fully capitalized by leaving some of their liabilities with the bad bank, starting with its shareholders, then bondholders (of which there are not many), then uninsured depositors. These creditors would, in effect, be written off. This would enable the new good banks to continue operating without serious interruption. The only real debate should be about how far to cut into depositors (so-called bailing creditors in) to rebalance assets and liabilities. The Economist argues that the write-offs should stop with shareholders and bondholders and all depositors should be made good via bailout funds from the European Stability Mechanism.

Depending on the particulars of the banking law, an insolvent but otherwise viable bank is put into receivership. This removes the shareholders from any control over the bank. Immediately the good assets of the bank, including its branch network and equipment, and staff would be sold to a new bank, which would assume all insured deposits and a proportionate amount of the uninsured deposit sufficient to match the value of the assets purchased. Ideally the new bank would be sold immediately to new private owners. But if more time is needed to organize its sell, it would be sold temporarily to the government for one Euro. What remains of the old bank would be liquidated and the proceeds would be apportioned in accordance with the priorities provided in the law to the credits (deposits that were not transferred to the new bank). As all of the good assets were transferred to the good bank, there would be virtually no further assets in the bad bank to recover and the remaining creditors would receive little to nothing.  The overall loss to depositors will depend on the losses incurred by the bank on its assets that made it insolvent in the first place. The orderly resolution described above almost always result it much smaller losses to creditors than a disorderly default in which the bank closes its doors totally.

Market discipline would clearly be more strengthened if uninsured depositors were also at risk of losing money. But increasing that risk unexpectedly and to too large an extent could cause deposit runs throughout Euro (and the world). Ultimately, but maybe not at the moment, this would be a good thing for the banking sector. Banks would have to behave more prudently or run the risk of losing deposits. Such market discipline is more effective in limited excessive risk taking by banks than is tighter supervision; though required capital and senior convertible bonds should be significantly increased in the future. In my view, the full recapitalization of all insolvent banks should be financed by bailing in as many uninsured depositors as needed to cover their capital deficiency. The IMF’s position, opposed by the EU, was that a good bank should assume only the insured depositors and receive sufficient good assets to cover them. This would leave all uninsured deposits in the bad bank, which were expected to suffer losses of 20 to 40 percent of their value.

The Cypriote officials originally proposed something quite different. They proposed a one-time levy on all depositors with a lower tax rate on smaller insured deposits. Thus both insured and uninsured depositors in good banks as well as bad ones would be paying to cover the losses of insolvent ones. Not exactly a boost to market discipline of banks. Depositors everywhere and especially in the Euro zone were shocked and the Cyprus Parliament rejected the proposal.

It will be interesting to know what motivated this crazy idea. For one thing it protects the shareholders from the loss of their shares and control of their banks, which is not a good idea from the point of view of the health of the banking system, though it may have been a deliberate goal of the plan (the shareholders are likely to be influential people in Cyprus). Antonis Samaras, the President of Cyprus, suggested that he wished to diminish the loss to large depositors (which include many wealthy Russians, some of whom have dealings with his law firm). Steve Hanke states that about half of Cyprus banks’ deposits are owed to Russians (including those of Russian subsidiaries established in Cyprus).

Whether lightening the burden of large depositors (sharing the burden more equitably according to the President) involved murky deals with Russians or the mistaken belief that it might save the large offshore deposit business Cyprus had developed (the deposit liabilities of its banks were eight time Cyprus’s GDP) only time will tell (maybe). Cyprus’s banking business is more like that of Iceland or Ireland before they crashed and burned several years ago, than the typical off shore financial centers like Cayman. The deposits in Cyprus are with Cyprus banks. If they become insolvent, depositors (or tax payers somewhere) lose. Foreign depositors in Cayman banks are actually depositing in branches of international banks with headquarters and assets elsewhere. Loses incurred by Cayman branches would be a small fraction of the total assets of the global bank and more easily absorbed.

Cyprus’s misguided attempt to spare large depositors at the expense of depositors in general, even if rejected in the end, greatly unnerved depositors everywhere and is likely to weaken rather than strengthen market discipline of bank risk taking.  By making the depositor haircut a levy/tax, Cyprus intended to bypass the bankruptcy/resolution provisions of the banking law and deposit insurance provisions. They created a mess.