Hell, Handbaskets and Hellenic Default

Regardless of what the IIF and the Greek government may announce, Greece is heading inevitably for a destabilising default to some or all of its bond creditors. The most articulate and comprehensive account of the reasons why this must be so are documented in the ZeroHedge masterclass on Subordination 101: A walk thru sovereign bond markets in a post-Greek default world. Roubini concurs.

I've written before about what this implies for the financial system:

If any OECD state were to default there would be very serious implications:
- The Basel Accord zero risk weight of government debt would be proved fanciful;
- The assumption of government debt as a liquid asset suitable for bank Tier 1 reserves to meet unanticipated and sudden cash demands will become unsustainable;
- Banks would be forced to recapitalise at much higher levels, forcing even sharper deleveraging and contraction of lending;
- Governments would lose the captive, uncritical investor base they have relied on to finance excess public expenditure for the past 30 years;
- Central banks could be forced to suddenly monetise even more government debt if required to meet the cash demands of a run on their undercapitalised banks.

Worrying, but not unexpected. A few of us predicted back in 2008 that the implosion of RMBS and bank capital, leading to central bank and sovereign bailouts, would fuel a central bank balance sheet and sovereign debt bubble. The central bank balance sheets have since balooned to 20 percent of GDP for the Fed and Bank of England, and 30 percent of eurozone GDP for the ECB. Deficits have spiraled everywhere, despite promises of austerity. Now the sovereign bubble too may burst.

From Deflation Has Become Inevitable in December 2008:

In Lombard Street, Bagehot’s seminal tome on fractional reserve central banking, Bagehot advises any central bank facing a simultaneous credit crisis and currency crisis to raise interest rates. By raising rates they will ensure that foreign creditors remain incentivised to maintain the general level of credit available while the central bank resolves the local liquidity crisis through liquidation of failed banks and temporary liquidity support of stressed banks.

The very opposite policies have been pursued by central banks in the US, Europe and UK since the beginning of the sub-prime crisis in August 2007. They have cut policy rates drastically, and as the crisis escalated and spread, the yield on government debt has dropped to negative territory. Meanwhile they have shielded those responsible for the creation of record levels of bad debt from any regulatory accountability, relaxed transparency of accounts, and provided massive taxpayer-funded financial infusions to prevent failure and liquidation.

While in the short term these policies have expediency and the maintenance of market “confidence” on their side, in the longer term these policies must undermine any confidence a rational and objective saver or investor might have that savings or investment in the US, EU or UK will be fairly remunerated at an above-inflation rate, or that savings and investments will be protected by effective oversight and regulation from the sorts of executive debasement and outright misappropriation and fraud that are beginning to colour our perceptions of the past decade.

Anyone sitting on a pile of cash now is unlikely to want to either (a) place it in a bank, or (b) invest it in the stock market. As a result, the implosion of the financial and real economy must continue no matter how big the central bank’s aspirations for its balance sheet or the treasury’s aspirations for its deficit.

I'm sorry I was right. (sigh)