Jumat, 13 April 2012

Spain in focus - LTRO effect on spanish banks , Rajoy and Monti butting heads.

http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2012/04/ltro-operation-is-pushing-spanish-banking-system-closer-to-collapse.html


I thought I’d point out that the already severely undercapitalised Spanish banking system is being crushed by the spike in Spanish sovereign yields.
If you recall, last November when the euro crisis last flared, my argument was that questioning Italy’s solvency leads inevitably to monetisation because Italy was too big to bail. At the time, I also argued the end result of that monetisation would be investors piling in once the ECB figured out how to deliver. Here’s the key paragraph from my November monetisation article to focus on in the Spanish context (emphasis in original quote):
If a central bank guarantees investors credibly that they can invest in certain debt instruments and not suffer principal or interest repayment risk, but only currency and inflation risk, some investors are almost definitely going to buy the debt instruments with the greatest yield pick up. Put another way, the only reason not to buy Italian debt at 2 or 300 basis points over Bunds, or Greek debt at 3 or 400 basis points over Bunds is because those governments are not credibly backstopped by the ECB.
The ECB offered up an implicit backstop in the LTRO (hint, hint, wink, wink). Investors jumped at the chance to get higher yielding ‘risk-free’ government bond investments on the back of this. This has all gone pear-shaped though – because the backstop has lost credibility. A quote from Bloomberg economist David Powell gets at both the magnitude of the bet on Spanish bonds and the magnitude of capital losses so far (hat tip to Warren Mosler).
Banks in Spain have been saddled with losses of about 1.6 billion euros as a result of the liquidity operation conducted in December, according to Bloomberg Brief estimates. Spanish lenders purchased 45.7 billion euros of government bonds during the months of December, January and February, according to monthly data from the ECB, and the average of the current prices of two-, six- and 10-year government bonds of Spain is 3.5 percent below the average of the average of those prices from Dec. 22 to March 1.
Make no mistake, the easy LTRO money that Portuguese, Italian, Irish and Spanish banks are all addicted to is monetisation pure and simple despite what officials might claim.
Here’s the thing though. The Europeans don’t want to see the ECB writing the check. Supporters of a hard currency euro know that Italy and Spain would have no reason to make reforms or move to fiscal consolidation without the sovereign insolvency stick and so they are using that stick as much as they can reasonably do. The problem with this approach is it will subject the euro zone to crisis again and again because austerity is a debt deflationary policy response. There is zero chance these countries are getting out of this without continual monetisation. Eventually, in every case in the periphery we will get what I said in 2010 are the only three options for the euro zone: monetisation, default, or break-up.
Now, looking at the specific scenario for Italy and Spain, in December I put it this way:
In sum, Europe is certainly a problem that will flare because the longer-term solution is a combination of credit writedowns, more bank capital, a lender of last resort and economic growth. Right now, the solution is no credit writedowns, maybe some bank capital eventually, some monetisation and economic anti-growth. Big difference.
So I expect Europe to continue the extend and pretend approach, creating volatility and crisis. And the question again and again will be: does the ECB write the check. I believe they will.
Looking at what’s happening now with Spain, you can see extend and pretend is going down the same route it has done in Greece , Portugal and Ireland. But, of course, Spain is too big for any of the EU’s bail out funds. It will all boil down to whether the ECB writes the check.
and...
Eurointelligence Daily Briefing: Rajoy tells Monti to stop blaming Spain
Tensions are mounting in the eurozone, as a frustrated Mariano Rajoy hits back at Mario Monti's increasingly frequent protestations that Spain is the real troublespot in the eurozone; he said he expect more support from the EU; Benoit Coeure says ECB is ready to intervene, a statement that temporarily helped to calm markets yesterday, as the euro rose, and Spanish yields softened; the European Commission said yesterday that Spain will not need an ESM programme; Wolfgang Munchau says crisis returned because investors have lost confidence in crisis resolution policies in Spain, and because the fallacies of the LTRO are becoming apparent; Martin Wolf says the Bundesbank is wrong in claiming that the adjustment in the eurozone must come from deficit countries alone; he warns against a beggar-thy-neighbour policy the contours of which are already emerging; Spain seeks to calm investor nerves with quarterly reports on the fiscal position of the autonomous regions; Fitch says the troubles of the Spanish banking sector are likely to persist; Pierre Briancon writes that the eurozone obsession with austerity is the main driver of the crisis right now; a former German justice ministers says she will launch a constitutional complaint against the ESM and the fiscal pact; Assmussen backs IMF call to look at debt relief for homeowners; New Democracy is losing political support to far-right parties; Le Monde, meanwhile, has interesting comparison between the campaigns of Giscard d'Estaing in 1981 and Nicolas Sarkozy today.


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