If PIIGS have to fly, they will need to exit the euro


Vivek Kaul

I’ve long said that capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell. – Frank Borman
If you have been following the business newspapers lately, you would have probably come to the conclusion by now that a break-up of the euro will lead to a huge catastrophe in Europe as well as the rest of the world.
Yes, there will be problems. But the world will be a much better place if the countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain opt out of the euro. To know why read on.
How it all started
The European Coal and Steel Community was an economic organisation formed by six European nations in 1958. This gradually evolved into the European Union (EU) which was established by the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. The EU introduced the euro on 1 January 1999. On this day, 11 member countries of the EU started using euro as their currency. Before the euro came into being the German currency deutschemark used to be the premier currency of Europe. The euro inherited the strength of the deutschemark. The world looked at the euro as the new deutschemark.
The move to euro benefitted countries such as Portugal, Italy , Ireland , Greece and Spain (together now known as the PIIGS). Before these countries started to use euro as a currency, they had to borrow money at interest rates much higher than the rates at which a country like Germany borrowed. When these countries started to use the Euro they could borrow money at interest rates close to that of Germany, which was economically the best managed country in the EU.
Easy money and the borrowing binge
With interest rates being low, the PIIGS countries as well as their citizens went on a borrowing binge. Greece took the lead among these countries. The Greek politicians launched a large social spending programme which subsidised most of the key public services. In fact a few years back, the finance minister of Greece claimed that he could save more money shutting down the Railways and driving people around in taxies. In 2009, Greece railways revenues were at around $250 million and the losses of around $1.36billion. All this extravagance has was financed through borrowing.
Greece was not the only country indulging in this extravagance, other PIIGS nations had also joined in. Also other than the low interest rates, the inflation in the PIIGS countries was higher than the rate of interest being charged on loans.
As John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper write in Endgame – The End of the Debt Supercycle and How it Changes Everything “In plain English, that means that if the borrowing rate is 3 percent while inflation is 4 percent you’re effectively borrowing for 1 percent less than inflation. You’re being paid to borrow. And borrow they did. And the European peripheral countries (PIIGS) racked up enormous amount of debt in euros.”
This was because loans were being made by German, French and British banks who were able to raise deposits at much lower interest rates in their respective countries and offer it at a slightly higher rate in the PIIGS countries.
The citizens of Spain borrowed big time to speculate in real estate. All this building was financed through the bank lending. Loans to developers and construction companies amounted to nearly $700billion or nearly 50% of the Spain’s current GDP of nearly $1.4trillion. Currently Spain has as many homes unsold as the United States (US), though the US is six times bigger than Spain. With homes lying unsold developers are in no position to repay. And Spain’s biggest three banks have assets worth $2.7trillion or that is double Spain’s GDP, are in trouble.
The accumulated debt in Spain is largely in the private sector. On the other hand the Italian government debt stands at $2.6trillion, the fourth largest in the world. The debt works out to around 125% of the Italian gross domestic product (GDP). As a recent report titled A Primer on Euro Breakup brought out by Variant Perception points out “Greece and Italy have a high government debt level. Spain and Ireland have very large private sector debt levels. Portugal has a very high public and private debt level.” Debt as we all know needs to be repaid, and that’s where all the problems are. But before we come to that we need to understand the German role in the entire crisis.
The German connection
Germany became the largest exporter in the world on the strength of the euro. Before euro became a common currency across Europe, German exports stood at around €487billion in 1995. In 1999, the first year of euro being used as a currency the exports were at €469billion euros. Next year they increased to €548billion euros. And now they stand at more than a trillion euros. Germany is the biggest exporter in the world even bigger than China.
With euro as a common currency took away the cost of dealing with multiple currencies and thus helped Germany expand its exports to its European neighbours big time. Also with a common currency at play exchange rate fluctuations which play an important part in the export game no longer mattered and what really mattered was the cost of production.
Germany was more productive than the other members of the European Union given it an edge when it came to exports. As Mauldin and Tepper point out “since the beginning of the Euro in 1999, Germany has become some 30 per cent more productive than Greece. Very roughly, that means it costs 30 per cent more to produce the same amount of goods in Greece than in Germany. That is why Greece imports $64 billion and exports only $21 billion.”
German banks also had a role to play in helping increasing German exports. They were more than happy to lend to citizens, governments and firms in PIIGS countries. So the way it worked was that German banks lent to other countries in Europe at low interest rates, and they in turn bought German goods and services which are extremely competitively priced as well as of good quality. Hence German exports went up.
The PIIGS countries owe a lot of money to German banks. Greece needs to repay $45billion. Spain owes around $238billion to Germany. Italy, Ireland and Portugal owe $190billion, $184 billion and $47billion respectively.
Inability to repay
When the going is good and everything is looking good there is a tendency to borrow more than one has the ability to repay, in the hope that things will continue to remain good in the days to come. But good times do not last forever and when that happens the borrower is in no position to repay the loan taken on.
Greece tops this list. It has been rescued several times and the private foreign creditors have already taken a haircut on their debt i.e. they have agreed to the Greek government not returning the full amount of the loan. Between Spain and Italy around €1.5trillion of money needs to be repaid over the next three years. The countries are in no position to repay the debt. It has to be financed by taking on more debt. It remains to be seen whether investors remain ready to continue lending to these countries.
In the past countries which have come under such heavy debt have done one of the following things: a) default on the debt b) inflate the debt c) devalue the currency.
Scores of countries in the past have defaulted on their debt when they have been unable to repay it. A very famous example is that of Russia in 1998. It defaulted both on its national as well as international debt. Oil prices had crashed to $11 per barrel. Oil revenue was the premier source of income for the Russian government and once that fell, there was no way it could continue to repay its debts.
If the country’s debt is in its own currency, all the government needs to do is to print more of it in order to repay it. This has happened time and again over the years all over the world. Every leading developing and developed country has resorted to this at some point of time. The third option is to devalue the currency and export one’s way out of trouble.
Exit the euro
The PIIGS countries cannot print euros and repay their debt. Since they are in a common currency area there is no way that they can devalue the euro. A straight default is ruled out because German and French banks will face huge losses, and Germany being driving force behind the euro, wouldn’t allow that to happen.
So what option do the PIIGS then have? One option that they have is to exit the euro, redominate the foreign debt in their own currency, devalue their currency and hope to export their way out of trouble.
A lot has been written about how you can only enter the euro and not exit it. The situation as is oft repeated is like a line from an old Eagles number Hotel California “You can checkout any time you like / But you can never leave.” A case has also been made as to how it would be disaster for any country leaving the euro.
Let’s try and understand why the situation will not be as bad as it is made out to be. A report titled A Primer on Euro Breakup, about which I briefly talked about a little earlier explains this situation very well.
The first thing to do as per the report is to exit the euro by surprise over a weekend when the markets are closed. Many countries have stopped using one currency and started using another currency in the past. A good example was the division of India and Pakistan. As the report points out “ One example of a currency breakup that went smoothly despite major civil unrest is the separation of India and Pakistan in August 1947. Before the partition of India, the two countries agreed that the Reserve Bank of India (the RBI) would act as the central bank of Pakistan until September 1948….Indian notes overprinted with the inscription “Government of Pakistan” were legal tender. At the end of the transition period, the Government of Pakistan exchanged the non-overprinted Indian notes circulating in Pakistan at par and returned them to India in order to de-monetize them. The overprinted notes would become the liabilities of Pakistan.”
Any country looking to exit Euro could work in a similar way. It will need to have provisions in place to overprint euros and deem them to be their own currency. Then it will have quickly issue new currency and exchange the overprinted notes for the new currency. Capital controls will also have to be put in place for sometime so that the currency does not leave the country.
Despite the fact that there are no exit provisions from the euro, after the creation of the European Central Bank, the individual central banks of countries were not disbanded. And they are still around. “All the euro countries still have fully functioning national central banks, which should greatly facilitate the distribution of bank notes, monetary policy, management of currency reserves, exchange-rate policy, foreign currency exchange, and payment. The mechanics for each central bank remain firmly in place,” the report points out.
Technical default
By applying the legal principle of lex monetae – that a country determines its own currency, the PIIGS countries can re-dominate their debt which they had issued under their local laws into the new currency. As the report points out “Countries may use the principle of lex monetae without problems if the debt contracts were contracted in its territory or under its law. But private and public bonds issued in foreign countries would be ruled on by foreign courts, who would most likely decide that repayment must be in euros.”
The good thing is that in case of Greece, Spain and Portugal, nearly 90% of the bonds issued are governed by local law. While redomination of currencies in their own currencies will legally not be a default, it will be categorized as a default by ratings agencies and international bodies.
Another problem that has brought out is the possibility of bank runs if countries leave the euro. Well bank runs are already happening even when countries are on the euro. (The entire report can be accessed here: http://www.johnmauldin.com/images/uploads/pdf/mwo022712.pdf).
The PIIGS coutnries can devalue their new currencies make themselves export competitive and hope to export their way out of trouble. This is precisely what the countries of South East Asia after the financial crisis of the late 1990s. As the report points out “history shows that following defaults and devaluations, countries experienced two to four quarters of economic contraction, but then real GDP grew at a high, sustained pace for years. The best way to promote growth in the periphery, then, is to exit the euro, default and devalue.”
The German export machinery
A breakup of the euro will create problems for the highly competitive export sector that Germany has built up. The PIIGS countries would start competiting with it when it came to exports. Given this they will not let the euro break so easily. As the bestselling author Michael Lewis said in an interview sometime back “German leadership does not want to be labeled as the people who destroyed the euro.”
But as Lewis also said “If you put Germany together with Greece in a single currency, it’s a little like watching an Olympic sprinter and a fat old man running a three-legged race. The Greeks will never be as productive as the Germans, and the Germans will never be as unproductive as the Greeks.” So it’s best for PIIGS countries to exit the euro.
In the end let me quote my favourite economist John Kenneth Galbraith as a disclaimer: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
(The article originally appeared at www.firstpost.com on May 19,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/world/if-piigs-have-to-fly-they-will-need-to-exit-the-euro-314589.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])

Yesterday, once more! Is the world economy going the Japan way?

Vivek Kaul

High risk means high returns.
Or does it?
Not always.
When more risk does not mean more return
The ten year bond issued by the United States (US) government currently gives a return of around 1.8% per year. Bonds are financial securities issued by governments to finance their fiscal deficits i.e. the difference between what they earn and what they spend.
Returns on similar bonds issued by the government of United Kingdom (UK) are at1.9% per year.
Nearly five years back in July 2007 before the start of the financial crisis the return on the US bonds was at 5.1% per year. The return on British bonds was at 5.5% per year.
The return on German bonds back then was around 4.6% per year. Now it stands at 1.44% per year.
Since the start of the financial crisis governments all over the world have been running huge fiscal deficits in order to try and create some economic growth. They have been financing these deficits through increasing borrowing.
In 2007, the deficit of the US government stood at $160billon. This difference was met through borrowing. The accumulated debt of the US government at that point of time was $5.035trillion.
In 2012, the deficit of the US government is expected to be at $1.327trillion or around 8.3times more than the deficit in 2007. The accumulated debt of the US government is also around three times more now and has crossed $14trillion.
The situation in the United Kingdom is similar. In 2007 the fiscal deficit was at £9.7billion. The projected deficit for 2012 is around 9.3times more at £90billion. The government debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) has gone up from around 37% of GDP to around 67% of GDP.
The same trend seems to be happening throughout the countries of Western Europe as well. Hence we can conclude that it is more risky to lend to the governments of United States, United Kingdom and countries like Germany and France in Western Europe. Though to give Germany the due credit it doesn’t run fiscal deficits as large as US or UK for that matter. Its fiscal deficit in 2010 had stood at €100billion but was cut to around €25.8billion in 2011.
Even though the riskiness of lending to these countries has gone up, the investors have been demanding lower returns from the governments of these countries. Why is that?
The answer might very well lie in what happened in Japan in the late 1980s.
The Japan story
The Japanese central bank started running a low interest policy to help exports from the mid 1980s. This other than helping exports fuelled massive bubbles in both the stock market as well as the real estate market. The Nikkei 225, Japan’s premier stock market index, returned 237% from the start of 1985 to December 29,1989, the day it peaked at a level of 38,916 points. The real estate prices also shot through the roof. As Paul Krugman points out in The Return of Depression Economics “Land, never cheap in crowded Japan, had become incredibly expensive…the land underneath the square mile of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace was worth more than the entire state of California.”
This was the mother of all bubbles.
Yasushi Mieno took over as the 26th governor of the Bank of Japan, the Japanese central bank, on December 17, 1989. Eight days later on December 25, 1989, he shocked the market by raising the interest rate. And more than that, he publicly declared that he wanted the land prices to fall by 20%, which he later upped to 30%. Mieno didn’t stop and kept raising interest rates.
The stock market crashed. And by October 1990 it was down nearly 40%. Since then the stock market has largely been on its way down. And it currently quotes at 8,900 points down 77% from the peak.
The real estate prices also fell but not at the same fast rate as the stock market. As Ruchir Sharma writes in Breakout Nations – In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracle “ “The greatest bubble in human history” burst in 1990 with no pain at all, like falling off Everest without breaking a bone. At its peak Japan accounted for 40 percent of the property value of the planet, but instead of collapsing, the price of real estate slowly declined at a 7% annual rate for two decades, ultimately falling by a total of about 80%. There was never a major round of foreclosures or bankruptcies, as the government kept bailing out debtors, ruining its own finances.”
The GDP growth rate collapsed from 3.32% in 1991 to -0.14% in 1999. In the next ten years i.e. between 2000 and 2009, the GDP growth rate never went beyond 2.74% and was at -5.37% in 2009.
The balance sheet depression
Japan has been in what economist Richard Koo calls a balance sheet recession. What this means in simple English is that after bubbles burst, specially real estate bubbles, the private sector companies as well as individuals and families who had speculated on the bubble end up with a lot of excessive debt and an asset (like land or stocks) which is losing value. The excessive debt has to repaid. Given this individuals and companies try to save, in order to repay the debt. But what is good for the individual is not always good for the overall economy.
The paradox of thrift
John Maynard Keynes unarguably the greatest economist of the twentieth century called this the paradox of thrift. What Keynes said was that when it comes to thrift or saving, the economics of an individual differs from the economics of the system as a whole.
If one person saves more then saving makes tremendous sense for him. But as more and more people start doing the same thing there is a problem. This is primarily because what is expenditure for one person is an income for someone else. Hence, when everybody spends less, businesses see a fall in revenue. This means lower aggregate demand and hence slower or even no growth for the overall economy.
The Japanese savings rate at the time when the bubble popped was around 0%. After this the Japanese started to save more and the savings rate of the Japanese private sector and households increased. It reached around 16% of the GDP in the year 2000.
All this money was being used to pay off the excess debt that had been accumulated. This meant slower growth for Japan. The government in turn tried to pump economic growth by spending more and more money. For this it took on more debt and now the Japanese government debt to GDP ratio is around 240%.
Ironically as the government debt went up the return on the government debt kept coming down. As Martin Wolf of Financial Times points out in a recent column “At the end of 1990, when its “bubble economy” went pop, the Japanese government’s 10-year bond was yielding 6.7 per cent…But yields on 10-year Japanese government bonds (JGBs) fell to close to 2 per cent in 1997 and then, with sizeable fluctuations, to troughs of 0.8 per cent in 1998, 0.4 per cent in 2003 and, recently, to 0.9 per cent. In short, the worse the Japanese government’s present and prospective debt position has become, the lower the interest rates on JGBs has also become.” (All returns per year)
The reason for this in retrospect is very straightforward. As the Japanese individuals and companies were saving more they did not want to risk their savings in either the stock market which had been continuously falling or the real estate market which was also falling, though at a slower rate. Hence a major part of the savings went into JGBs which they thought were safer. Given that there was great demand for JGBs the Japanese government could get away with offering lower returns on its bonds, even though over the years they became riskier.
The Japan Way
Richard Koo believes that what happened in Japan over the last twenty years is now happening in the US, UK and parts of Europe. Individuals in these countries are saving more to pay off their excess debts. An average American in the month of March 2012 saved 3.8% of his disposable income in March 2012. Before the crisis the American savings rate had become negative. . The same stands true for Great Britain where savings of household were -3% at the time the crisis struck. They have since gone up to 3% of GDP. The corporate sector was saving 3% of GDP is now saving 5% of GDP. Same stands true for Spain, Ireland and Portugal where savings were in negative territory (i.e. the people were borrowing and spending) before the crisis struck, and are now going up. In the case of Ireland the savings have gone up from -10% of GDP to around 5% of the GDP since the crisis struck.
Hence companies and individuals across countries are saving more to pay off the excess debt they had accumulated. This in turn has meant that they are spending lesser money than they used to. This has led to slower economic growth. A large part of these savings is going into government bonds keeping returns low. Retail investors have taken out nearly $260billion out of equity mutual funds in the United States since 2008, even though the stock market has doubled in the last three years. At the same time they have invested nearly $800billion in bond funds, which give very low returns.
ZIRP – Zero interest rate policy
The governments of these countries have cut interest rates to almost 0% levels and are also borrowing and spending more money. That as was the case in Japan has resulted in some economic growth, but nowhere as much as they had expected. Even though governments want their citizens and companies to borrow and spend money in order to revive economic growth, they are in no mood to do that.
The citizens would rather pay off their existing debt than take on new debt. And the companies need to feel that the economic opportunity is good enough to invest, which it clearly isn’t. That explains to a large level why US companies are sitting on more than $2trillion of cash.
The banks are also not willing to take on the risk of lending at such low interest rates, as was the case in Japan. What has also not helped is the case of continuously bailing out the financial sector like was the case in Japan. Hence real estate prices in countries like Spain still need to fall by 35% to come back at normal levels.
Slow growth
All in all most of the Western world is headed towards the Japan way, which means slow economic growth in the years to come. As Sharma writes “Over the next decade, growth in the United States, Europe and Japan is likely to slow…owing to the large debt overhang”. This will impact exports out of countries like China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India etc. The Chinese exports for the month of April 2012 grew at 4.9% in comparison to 8.9% during the same period last year. This in turn has pushed down imports. Imports grew at a negligible 0.33% against the expected 11%.
A slowdown in Chinese imports immediately means lower prices for commodities. As Sharma puts it “It’s my conviction that the China-commodity connection will fall apart soon. China has been devouring raw materials at a rate way out of line with the size of its economy… Since 1990, China’s share of global demand for commodities ranging from aluminum to zinc has skyrockected from the low single digits to 40,50,60 % – even though China accounts for only 10% of total global output.” .
Over a longer term slower growth in the Western World will also means slower and lower stock markets. As the old Chinese curse goes “may you live in interesting times”. The interesting times are upon us.
(This post originally appeared on Firstpost.com on May 17,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/economy/japan-disease-is-spreading-high-risk-and-low-returns-311952.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])