Why the Bailout in Spain Won’t Work

It was not enough. And it may never be enough.

The euro zone’s offer of $125 billion to bail out Spanish banks over the weekend was hailed by finance ministers and officials across Europe as a masterstroke. Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, suggested no further bailouts would be needed, saying, “Spain is on the right track.” On Sunday, some analysts and investors even applauded, with David R. Kotok, co-founder and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, proclaiming: “Euro zone leaders rose to the occasion.” How wrong they were.
By now, it should be apparent that the bailout has failed — or is at least on its way to failing.

After a brief rally Monday morning, stock markets in Spain swooned. The 10-year Spanish bond — perhaps the greatest indicator of confidence, or in this case a lack of confidence — jumped higher, to about 6.5 percent, demonstrating that investors were now even more anxious about the country’s ability to pay back its debts than they were the day before the bailout was announced. Seven percent was the threshold that preceded the government bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal in 2010 and 2011. The cost on Monday of buying credit-default swaps — or insurance — on Spanish debt spiked, too.

Indeed, it now appears that the bailout could make things in Spain worse, not better. And market indicators for the next domino in line for a bailout, Italy, point in the wrong direction.

This was bound to happen. That’s because bailing out the banks in each European country individually is a fool’s errand.

Experts often note — wrongly — that TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program that pumped $700 billion into the banking system in the United States, arrested the financial crisis in 2008. TARP, to some degree, has become the model for Europe.

But we forget history: TARP was only one component of the bailout. Perhaps more important — consider it the unsung hero of ending the crisis — was the government’s unilateral move to raise the amount of money the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation could insure, increasing the account limit to $250,000 from $100,000 and fully backstopping the entire money-market industry.

Investors and bank customers who were considering taking their deposits and running in 2008 no longer had reason to do so once deposits and money-market funds had been guaranteed. Keeping your money at Citigroup or Bank of America was relatively indistinguishable from a safety standpoint.

That is not the case in Europe. Customers of Spanish banks still have reason to worry about the solvency of their banks — and their country — making it reasonable for them to take their money from Spanish banks and send it to banks in safer countries like Germany. Indeed, the bailout makes it less likely Spain can pay back its debts because the new loan of up to $125 billion was just added to its huge debt pile. Worse, Spanish banks had been the biggest buyers of Spanish debt (a farce of a way to prop up the economy) and that most likely won’t continue.

As a result, it could be argued that it would be irresponsible for an individual or company, which has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, not to move its money out of Spanish banks. Of course, money leaving the banks can become a self-fulfilling vicious cycle that virtually no amount of bank bailouts can plug. (By the way, countries like Spain have their own version of F.D.I.C., but it is all but worthless if you believe the country could collapse under its own debt.)

Ultimately, the only real way to begin to ensure the safety of the banks in Spain — and all of Europe — is to create a euro zone deposit guarantee system so that there would be no reason for a depositor to withdraw money. European leaders are expected to address the idea, along with regional banking regulation and a way to recapitalize ailing euro zone institutions, at a summit meeting at the end of the month. Oddly enough, such a deposit guarantee would probably be pretty cheap. The psychological effect of such a guarantee would most likely ensure the solvency of more banks than the guarantee would ever have to pay out. That was the experience in the United States.

Of course, there’s a catch. A euro zone deposit guarantee would require agreement from all the countries that use the euro, which is something that the leaders there seem incapable of reaching because ultimately it would mean tighter integration and, yes, a loss of sovereignty.

And here’s another problem with a euro zone deposit guarantee: Unless you believe the euro is going to remain the standard — that countries like Greece or Spain won’t be forced out or secede from the currency — even the guarantee might not be enough, unless the guarantee holds for all currencies. For example, if a Spanish bank customer is worried that his euros might one day turn into pesetas — even with a deposit guarantee in place — he may well move his money.

In the meantime, this piecemeal approach is bound to fail. Kicking the can down the road, to use again an overused phrase, at some point will fail — and that’s what may have just happened.

Source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/why-the-bailout-in-spain-wont-work/

Some European Companies Try Bonds to Raise Cash

Among the midsize, family-owned companies that power the German economy, it has long been an article of faith: credit comes from the friendly local banker, not from cold and distant capital markets.

Andreas Dombret, a member of the executive board of the Bundesbank, said the sale of debt by companies was “limited in scope” but a “welcome response” to tighter lending by banks.

 

So Peter H. Leibold was breaking from the norm last year when he decided to finance the expansion of his company, which makes wood pellets for heating and energy generation, by selling corporate bonds. The company, German Pellets, raised more than 80 million euros ($102 million).

Now he is a convert. 

“The advantage of a bond is that you can raise a large amount from a completely different group of investors,” said Mr. Leibold, the founder and chief executive of the company, which is based in Wismar, on the coast in northern Germany. 

Corporate bonds — essentially, interest-bearing i.o.u.’s that companies sell to whomever is willing to buy — have long been an essential borrowing tool for companies in the United States. 

But in Europe, borrowing from banks, whether local ones or big multinationals, has traditionally been the preferred way to raise money. Just 9 percent of corporate credit in the euro zone comes from debt markets, according to the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, compared with 64 percent in the United States.

But as the euro zone’s financial crisis has forced many banks to hoard cash and curtail lending, more European companies are turning to bond markets. If the trend continues, it could not only begin reversing the Continent’s longstanding preference for bank credit, but also make the region less prone to banking crises.

There might be resistance, however, from European regulators, who regard such borrowing as a form of shadow banking that they cannot control. In addition, bank lobbyists might fight what they see as competition. 

“People are afraid of a financial system not based on what they know, which is financial intermediation by banks,” said Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research group in Brussels. 

The fears are not unfounded. The propensity of banks in the United States to turn loans into securities that can be sold to investors arguably helped create the subprime mortgage crisis. 

But later on, there was an upside: the practice meant that the fates of companies in the United States were less coupled to those of banks. Not so in Europe, where the problems of credit institutions remain a grave threat to the rest of the economy. 

“Euro-area firms are particularly vulnerable to reduction in bank credit because of their greater reliance on banks for funding,” the International Monetary Fund said in a report last month. 

Companies’ tapping of euro zone bond markets has surged this year, more than doubling to $107 billion in the first quarter, according to Dealogic, a data provider. For the first time since 2009, bond issues surpassed syndicated bank loans as a source of financing for larger companies. 

When even large European banks are cutting back on risk, bond issues enable companies to raise money from investors outside the euro zone who are less affected by the crisis. 

It remains unclear, though, to what extent debt markets can fill the vacuum left by troubled European banks. Bond markets might not help the thousands of smaller companies that form the backbone of the euro zone economy but are too small to attract investors’ attention. 

“The corporate sector in Europe still comprises mostly small- and medium-sized enterprises that will continue to rely on bank loans,” Andreas Dombret, a member of the executive board of the Bundesbank, said in an e-mail. 

The countries that need credit most desperately are also the ones with the highest proportion of small firms least able to gain access to debt markets. Companies with 50 employees or fewer employ 68 percent of the work force in Italy and 62 percent in Spain, according to Goldman Sachs. Those figures compare with 40 percent in Germany. 

“For smaller firms in particular, the fixed costs can simply be too high, rendering a bond issuance uneconomical under all circumstances,” Dirk Schumacher, an economist at Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, wrote in a report last month. 

But the experience of German Pellets, which had sales of 275 million euros ($350 million) last year and has 500 employees, suggests that bonds could be an alternative for at least some midsize companies.

Mr. Leibold said that it initially had taken some effort to explain to investors why wood pellets were an interesting business. The pellets are a source of renewable energy and are cheaper than oil or natural gas, he told them. 

Mr. Leibold, who founded the company in 2005 after he saw wood pellets being made by small operations in Sweden and realized there was an opening for a mass producer, says his sales are rising — even in Greece — as people and companies look to cut costs. 

Eventually, investors came around. The company used the money it raised to make several acquisitions and build new manufacturing plants, including one in Woodville, Tex., that is to employ 250 people when it is completed later this year. 

German Pellets also continues to draw on traditional bank financing, Mr. Leibold said. But the bond market provides a diversity of fund sources, without the drawbacks of a stock listing. Like many European entrepreneurs, Mr. Leibold expresses an aversion to going public. 

The company reflects his spirit and that of his colleagues, he said. 

“If German Pellets was listed on an exchange, it would change the company from that day on,” he said.

While there has been no broad effort to curtail debt issues, regulators at the European and national levels are now scrutinizing so-called shadow banking. That is a broad category that includes hedge funds and other activities outside the traditional banking system, as well as corporate bond issuance. 

In practice, corporate debt is typically handled within the banking system, with banks earning hefty fees for marketing the bonds. But because the business is dominated by large investment banks, the concern by some regulators is that smaller institutions have trouble competing in that market and could lose revenue as a result. 

Mr. Véron of Bruegel said central bankers might also worry that a shift from traditional banking could make it harder to control interest rates — their main policy tool. 

“The European Central Bank sees a need for more credit,” he said. “At the same time they are concerned about losing the monetary policy transmission channel.” 

For all that, though, officials do not seem to be terribly concerned. 

Mr. Dombret of the Bundesbank said that the sale of debt by companies was “limited in scope” and a “rational and welcome response” by companies to tighter lending by banks in many parts of the euro zone. 

Risks that banks will be bypassed “seem to be rather low at this stage,” he said, but he added that the Bundesbank would “continue to monitor this area.” 

Mr. Leibold of German Pellets, for his part, said he was happy with his bond experience and planned to tap debt markets again. But he was not sure bonds would work for all companies. “You need a story for investors,” he said. 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/business/global/credit-flows-through-a-new-channel-for-europe.html?_r=1&ref=global

Reshaping banking: The retreat from everywhere

SOME signs are subtle. Foreign lenders operating in America are tightening loan standards more sharply than domestic rivals; Hong Kong property developers are scrambling to issue bonds for want of other funding. But others—the “for sale” signs hung on the overseas assets of many European lenders—are pretty blatant. The ability and willingness of banks to compete across borders is unravelling.

Related topics

• Public finance
• United Kingdom
• Central banking
• Germany
• Government and politics

The years before the financial crisis saw rapid growth in the cross-border activities of banks. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the average year-on-year growth rate for cross-border bank credit to non-banks during the 2000-07 period was a sizzling 15.2%, compared with 6.7% for total bank credit. Since then cross-border credit has fizzled (see chart 1) and looks likely to fall further.

European lenders were in the vanguard during the era of internationalisation, and around a third of their assets are outside their home markets. They are now under pressure to slim down their balance-sheets quickly, partly to shore up capital and partly because of funding strains. The IMF this week projected that banks in the European Union would undergo a $2.6 trillion deleveraging over the next two years. Much of that will be achieved by running for home.

In March the Reserve Bank of Australia revealed that the departure of European lenders, in particular French banks, had left an A$34 billion ($35 billion) funding gap in the syndicated-loan market for local companies. The story is similar in the Middle East, where a rush this year to issue Islamic bonds, or sukuk, is attributed to a withdrawal of European lenders. Within Europe, too, national boundaries are being reinforced as lenders cut back their exposures to weaker markets (see chart 2). Non-European banks are also trimming their foreign portfolios as they rationalise their businesses: Citigroup agreed to sell its Belgian retail arm in December; HSBC is offloading businesses from Costa Rica to Pakistan.

Some of this is cyclical. After the first contraction of international activity in 2008-09, a rebound occurred, and something similar might be seen in response to the provision late last year of three-year liquidity by the European Central Bank (ECB), which has temporarily eased the strains on euro-area banks. But there is good reason to believe the retrenchment represents a structural change.

Retrenchment need not be disastrous. Much pre-crisis cross-border lending was foolish, after all; think of all the German money in subprime American mortgages. And foreign banks are not the only suppliers of cross-border capital: the importance of foreign direct investment and portfolio flows as a proportion of gross inflows has steadily risen over the past three decades.

But banks matter. There is evidence that cross-border banking relationships between pairs of countries encourage other types of capital flow; reduce them, and the other flows may dry up too. And the availability of bank financing is vital to smaller businesses or long-term asset-based activities such as infrastructure projects. “The alternatives to cross-border banking are autarkic financial systems, which means relying on domestic capital formation and thus higher costs, or international flows via bond markets, which are more volatile,” says Peter Sands, the boss of Standard Chartered, an emerging-markets bank.

Home is where the taxpayer is

Three powerful centripetal forces are at play: politics, regulation and deleveraging. Take politics first. The financial crisis, and the sovereign-debt crisis that followed it, have left no one in any doubt about the relationship between banks and the state. If big lenders get into trouble, taxpayers end up bailing them out.

Now it is payback time. Banks have come under pressure from their governments to prioritise the customers that rescued them. “Project Merlin” set Britain’s biggest banks targets for their lending to small and medium-sized enterprises; Commerzbank, a bailed-out German bank, is committed to concentrating its lending on Germany and Poland. In December Crédit Agricole, a French bank, outlined plans that included the closure of corporate- and investment-banking operations in 21 countries. “Crédit Agricole is mobilised on a day-to-day basis to support the plans of the French people,” ran the press release.

In the case of banks in the euro zone’s peripheral nations, the politics of patriotism also mean propping up the debt of their governments. Italian and Spanish banks have used the ECB’s three-year loans to boost their holdings of domestic government bonds. Spanish lenders increased their holdings by 26% in the two months to January; Italian banks upped theirs by 31% in the three months to February. This reflects, in part, a calculation that few banks can survive without a sovereign that looks solvent.

Regulations are also steering banks (and insurers) into holding domestic government debt. Rules on capital and liquidity label government debt as safe and render domestic government debt peculiarly so. The overall effect is to make balance-sheets look a lot more patriotic. Huw van Steenis of Morgan Stanley reckons that euro-zone banks have an average of 6% of their assets invested in domestic sovereign debt, and that their holdings are growing by the day.

Many other rules that are designed to make finance safer also risk making it more parochial. A big lesson of the crisis is that banks which are global in life are national in death. The bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and MF Global showed regulators how assets could easily get trapped in foreign jurisdictions, leaving a bigger bill for taxpayers back home. There are signs that, in response, regulators are treating foreign assets more harshly than domestic ones. Bankers say that stress tests carried out on American lenders by the Federal Reserve in March put their foreign loans under greater pressure than American ones. Recent guidance from Britain’s Financial Services Authority on lending in areas like commercial property jacked up risk charges on exposures where there is a lack of historical data; Bob Penn of Allen & Overy, a law firm, argues that this has the effect of privileging lending in home markets. With capital scarce, such tinkering matters.

As national regulators seek to stamp their authority on international finance, conflicts and inefficiencies arise in all sorts of areas. Britain has filed lawsuits against the ECB for its proposal to prohibit clearing-houses outside the euro area from being able to handle more than 5% of trading in euro-denominated instruments. Differences between proposed American and European rules on derivatives may mean that banks build separate infrastructures on either side of the Atlantic. Things that matter could fall into the cracks opening up; many worry that trade finance, the lifeblood of cross-border trade, will be heavily penalised under new liquidity rules.

Resolutions and reality

Planning for bank failures is the area where the interests of national regulators collide most forcefully with hopes of international co-ordination. The Financial Stability Board, a global watchdog, wants the big regulators of cross-border banks to work together in the event that banks need resolving, and many banks hope for such agreements. But the regulators’ focus is on their national interests, not those of the world, or of the banks.

As Simon Gleeson of Clifford Chance, a law firm, points out, no government will care as much about treating foreign creditors fairly as it cares about compensating its own people. Iceland, which screwed its banks’ foreign creditors in favour of domestic depositors, is a case in point. A typical regulator wants banks in its purview to have enough assets both to keep operating in times of crisis and to pay back domestic creditors in case of failure, whether the banks are domiciled there or not.

Home-market regulators thus prefer their lenders not to have too great an exposure elsewhere. Austria’s central bank has said that Austrian bank subsidiaries in central and eastern Europe should not exceed a loan-to-deposit ratio of 110%, a way of ensuring that their funding needs do not make too great a call on resources back at headquarters.

Emerging markets, now alive to the possibility that parent banks in the rich world can be a source of instability as well as support, have their own worries about the “portability” of capital, liquidity and assets. Guillermo Ortiz, a former Mexican finance minister who is now chairman of Banorte, a Mexican lender, wants subsidiaries of foreign banks in emerging markets to be ring-fenced so that money cannot be funnelled out of the country.

Particular problems attach to “living wills”, documents in which banks lay out for regulators their plans to survive periods of extreme stress and, if the worst happens, to provide supervisors with the information they need for resolution. The process of agreeing on living wills with regulators in the countries concerned creates pressure for banks to use subsidiaries abroad, which have to have their own capital, rather than branches, which don’t.

The decision to set up a subsidiary in a new market (as opposed to just opening a branch) may be a harder one for boards, since it involves legal incorporation and taking on personal liabilities. Some bankers worry, too, that subsidiary units may be nudged by supervisors into running separate IT and management systems in order to demonstrate that they can keep operating without the support of a parent, making them yet more inefficient. Rules that make it harder to move money around will make it harder to commit to distant opportunities. An executive at a big American bank says that such rules will force his firm to invest less abroad than would be ideal. For emerging markets that have shallow deposit bases and undeveloped domestic bond markets, it all adds up to slower credit growth.

Markets that erect firewalls around their banking systems may also be sacrificing resilience in the event of a future crisis. For all the worries about wobbly international banks, the support of Western parents has proved more helpful than not in eastern Europe so far. Other sources of finance can be flighty, too. When bond markets closed to Dubai in late 2009, international banks kept providing liquidity. “There is a trade-off here between probability of default and loss given default,” says Standard Chartered’s Mr Sands. “People are losing sight of the first and obsessing about the second.”

The LDR of the pack

Even if regulators and politicians were carefree onlookers, the need to deleverage would remain. Once again, Europe is home to the banks with the most work to do, less because of the need to raise more capital than because of the way they fund themselves. European banks are more reliant on wholesale markets than any other big banking system (see chart 3). According to Simon Samuels of Barclays Capital, lending by listed European banks exceeds their deposits by $1.3 trillion. American banks, by contrast, are awash in deposits, with a funding surplus of $1.3 trillion.

The European gap is filled by borrowing on wholesale markets. The capital markets have peeped open in the wake of the ECB’s three-year lending operations. But a peep is not enough. The ECB’s intervention was needed precisely because the euro-zone sovereign crisis and the increased need to factor in the losses that follow when a bank fails have left bond investors a lot less interested in holding bank debt than they were. So lenders have little choice but to bring down their wholesale-borrowing needs.

In practice, that often means pruning back activities abroad. Banks typically establish a presence in new markets by lending, and wait for deposits to catch up later. Foreign subsidiaries that have loan-to-deposit ratios (LDRs) in excess of 100% and that rely on cross-border funding from their parents are obvious deleveraging candidates. Eastern Europe is the region that looks most vulnerable on this score. It is the most reliant on foreign banks; and although those banks also raise local deposits, countries such as Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states are all big recipients of cross-border funding as well (see chart 4).

European banks are not about to shut down their foreign networks altogether, not least because the business they do abroad is often their best prospect of growth. Lenders are more likely to manage LDRs down by letting loans run off or by competing for more deposits than to pull out of countries altogether. But the effect will still be felt in the form of scarcer and dearer credit.

There is a faster route to funding salvation than reducing bread-and-butter commercial lending. One particularly striking feature of the pre-crisis expansion of Europe’s banks was that so much of their activity was in dollar-denominated areas such as commercial-property lending, leveraged buy-outs, syndicated loans and commodity financing.

Some of that dollar activity was funded by deposits gathered by banks’ American units; another wodge of dollar funding came from swapping local deposits into foreign currency. But lots was gathered on wholesale markets, often in the form of short-term debt that needed to be constantly rolled over (think of the money provided to French banks by American money-market funds, whose flight from Europe last year caused so much trouble). This type of funding—short-term, wholesale and with an added dollop of foreign-currency risk for good measure—could not be further removed from the liabilities lenders, or their regulators, now want. With French banks in the vanguard, they are offloading dollar-denominated assets.

Among the sectors most exposed to this retreat are project finance, asset-based lending in shipping and aviation, and infrastructure funding. These are areas where assets tend to remain on banks’ balance-sheets for 10-15 years or more. That makes them unattractive bets: long-term dollar funding is hard to come by; short-term funding presents rollover risk; and lenders are wary of locking up bits of their balance-sheets inflexibly when things are so uncertain. To make matters worse, risks are high, so these kinds of lending use up lots of capital.

Alternatives to bank finance are harder to come by in these areas than in areas like syndicated lending. The risks inherent in shipping, a notoriously cyclical industry, or infrastructure finance, where there is lots of construction risk, mean that credit ratings are low, making them a hard sell to bond investors. New regulations called Solvency 2 could make it harder for European insurers to hold long-dated assets. Bankers are now trying to cook up new ways of distributing such assets to investors. One option in infrastructure finance, says the boss of a big European bank, is for the bank to offer financing for the riskier construction phase and then hand over to bond markets when projects start to generate cash flows (although it is unclear what yield investors would demand in return).

The hidden harm

Such innovations are a reminder that the international financial system has many moving parts. New ways of securitising dollar-denominated assets could mean that banks end up slimming their balance-sheets more slowly. The homeward migration of European lenders opens the door to others: Japanese banks, which sit on a surplus of deposits and are willing to lend on a long-term basis, are now the first port of call for project-finance deals. Banks of no fixed abode, such as HSBC and Standard Chartered, may also be poised to benefit in some markets, and American banks could yet decide to become more expansionist. Corporate-bond markets provide another source of funding for larger firms.

But, for all this, a homeward bias in banking will raise costs for some countries, and some classes of client, a lot. Where the process of retrenchment is too swift, it will be hard to refinance some existing debts. Ring-fenced subsidiaries risk being more brittle in the event of a crisis. The costs of infrastructure finance will go up and its availability decline.

There may also be costs for markets that have previously exported deposits and are now seeing them return: some in Germany already worry that too much credit is sloshing around. Some of the forces pulling banks back home are reasonable ones. But once trillions of dollars are set in motion, getting them to settle back down in an optimal way is next to impossible.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/21553015

Sovereign bonds: Oat cuisine

FIFTEEN years ago Western government bonds were regarded as being like porridge: stodgy but easily digestible. Investors knew returns would be modest but perceived the asset class as risk-free, an important concept in both financial theory and portfolio construction. And bond markets were seen as all-powerful, capable of imposing discipline on governments by pushing up borrowing costs in the face of irresponsible policies. James Carville, an adviser to President Bill Clinton, spoke with awe of their intimidatory power.

Things are different now. The bond vigilantes seem less frightening. They were asleep at the wheel as debts mounted in the euro zone, waking up in time to provoke the latest crisis but not avoid it. Private-sector bond investors in Greek sovereign debt face losses of around 70%, making the idea that government bonds are risk-free laughable.

The most powerful investors in many government-bond markets are not profit-maximising fund managers but central and commercial banks, which are buying bonds for all sorts of reasons. Other investors need to be like Kremlinologists, guessing what central banks will do next.

The market is also much bigger than it was. According to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, there were some $11 trillion-worth of government bonds in issue at the end of 2001; by the end of 2011, that figure had risen to more than $31 trillion (see chart 1). And although some euro-zone countries have been cut off from the markets, the story is very different in other places. The British and American governments are enjoying the lowest borrowing costs they have seen for decades, despite big deficits.

The implications of all these changes are still being worked through. The risk-free rate has historically been the rock around which a financial system is built. Other borrowers, such as banks and corporations, pay a premium over their domestic government’s cost of debt. This is still true for companies that are tied to a local economy, such as utilities. But multinational firms can, in theory, move to economies where growth prospects are better and taxes lower. Some, such as Johnson & Johnson or Exxon Mobil, may thus now be seen as better bets than their governments.

Thanks to the European Central Bank’s lending activities, banks in several European countries can also now borrow more cheaply than their governments—a heavy irony given that it was the banking sector’s problems that ushered in the current sovereign-debt crisis. Indeed, investors have learned that simply studying the ratio of government debt to GDP is not enough. Both Ireland and Iceland entered the crisis with very low ratios. But the collapse of their banking sectors meant that private-sector debt was assumed by the government, causing the ratio to balloon.

Modern bond investors have to worry about other contingent liabilities, too—the pensions promised to public-sector workers, say, or the rising costs of Medicare as America’s baby-boomers retire. Governments might easily decide that such promises have a better claim on tax revenues than the rights of foreign creditors. The negotiations in Greece have shown that official creditors deem themselves to have a greater claim on a government’s revenues than private-sector creditors. The more official aid a country receives, the bigger the eventual write-off private bondholders may suffer.

The rise of official creditors is not new. It was first noticed in the 2000s when Asian central banks began to plough their massive foreign-exchange reserves into Treasury bonds. Alan Greenspan, the then chairman of the Federal Reserve, talked of the “conundrum” that bond yields were falling even as the Fed was pushing up short rates, a shift from the usual pattern.

The reason was that central banks were pretty indifferent to low yields, being content to park their reserves in the relative safety and liquidity of Treasury bonds as a way to manage their currencies’ level versus the dollar. More recently, central banks have been buying up their own government’s debt through quantitative easing (QE). It is debatable whether yields are set by economic fundamentals or by the anticipated buying patterns of central banks.

Of course, central-bank policy has always had an effect on the bond markets. One way of viewing long-term bond yields is as a forecast of future short-term rates (sometimes there is an additional premium for tying up your money). On that basis, says Eric Lonergan, a fund manager at M&G, the current level of Treasury-bond yields is quite rational. The average of American short rates over the past ten years is around 2%, almost exactly the level of the ten-year Treasury-bond yield now.

Rates are likely to remain low for some time. The Fed recently indicated that it expected rates to stay near zero until late 2014. Add in the effect of QE and the Fed may be the dominant influence on yields all the way out to bonds with maturities of five years. There is talk of a third round of QE from the Fed, and the Bank of England was set to add to its £275 billion ($437 billion) pile of gilts at a February 9th meeting, held after The Economist went to press.

Rates low, bond mountains high

Analysts argue about the precise impact of QE on yields but the presence of an ever-willing buyer must have some effect. In particular, it must make private-sector investors cautious about betting on higher yields. “Bond crashes become very unlikely, unless they are accepted by central banks,” says Patrick Artus of Natixis, a French bank. “Long-term interest rates could remain very low for a long time.”

Less clear is how central banks will ever dispose of these bond mountains. In practice, it makes no difference whether central banks try to sell their holdings or simply let the bonds mature (since maturing bonds have to be refinanced). Either way the private sector will have to absorb the extra supply on top of the new bonds being issued that year. If central banks are correct in arguing that QE has driven bond yields down, then logically a reversal of QE might drive yields up, in effect tightening monetary policy. It may be a long while before the economy is sufficiently robust to absorb the impact. Large central-bank holdings of government bonds may be a semi-permanent feature of the landscape.

Central banks are not the only distorting presence in the market. In Britain pension funds have been eager buyers of long-dated securities as a way of matching their liabilities (a promise to make pension payments for 25-30 years is equivalent to a debt). Since many pension benefits are linked to inflation, this has sparked a particular enthusiasm for inflation-linked debt. Insurance companies are also heavy buyers of government debt, in large part because of solvency requirements that push them into owning “safe” assets.

And then there are the banks. One feature of the early days of the euro was convergence. Short-term interest rates are the same across the zone. Since government-bond yields are related to expectations for future levels of short rates, bond yields equalised across the region. This was immensely beneficial for countries like Italy and Greece, which saw their borrowing costs fall. It also meant that banks happily owned regional, rather than merely national, government-bond portfolios.

Now that trend is reversing. Banks are suddenly conscious of the credit risk involved in holding another country’s bonds. When the crisis broke French banks were “encouraged” to hold on to their Greek bonds by their government and suffered losses as a result. Now it seems they are willing to buy only their own government’s bonds, and those of Germany; they are far less keen on holding Italian or Spanish debt. “It is almost if the euro zone has already broken up,” says Andrew Balls of PIMCO, a fund-management group.

Domestic banks, however, may well figure that holding the debt of their own sovereign is a “double or quits” bet. If their government defaults the banking system will collapse anyway, so they might as well own its bonds. That incentive has been reinforced by the ECB’s provision of virtually unlimited three-year loans. As President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has hinted, banks can borrow cheaply from the ECB and invest the proceeds in government debt, earning a higher yield in the process.

This is an approach to boosting bank profitability that has been tried before. In the early 1990s the Federal Reserve held rates very low (by prevailing standards) to help the banks recover from the savings-and-loan crisis. Banks were able to earn a “carry” by borrowing at 3% and buying ten-year Treasuries yielding almost 7%.

The carry trade is not the only reason why banks might buy government bonds. In the wake of the 2007-08 crisis, when banks were suddenly cut off from the wholesale markets, regulators have been urging banks to own a “liquidity cushion” of safe assets. Banks can use government bonds as collateral for loans with each other, and with central banks.

The result has been a big expansion in banks’ sovereign-bond purchases, very handy when governments have lots of bonds to sell. In Britain, data from the Debt Management Office show that banks and building societies owned just £26 billion-worth of gilts in the last quarter of 2008; by the end of 2011 they owned £131 billion, or around 10% of the total (see chart 2).

How would you like your loss?

The role that credit risk is now playing in the euro area highlights another great change in the government-bond markets: the influence of exchange-rate regimes. For decades countries struggled to cope with the constraints of fixed exchange-rate systems, whether the gold standard or Bretton Woods, in part because this approach would reassure foreign creditors. “Who would be prepared to lend with the fear of being paid in depreciated currencies always before his eyes?” asked Georges Bonnet, a French finance minister of the 1920s.

But the euro crisis has shown the perils for international investors of a fixed-rate regime. Denied the option of devaluation, Greece is being forced, in effect, to default on its debts. In contrast America and Britain, with their floating exchange rates, have the freedom to expand their money supplies and depreciate their currencies. Although this may still result in losses for foreign investors, they are likely to be far smaller than the Greek write-offs. As Mr Balls puts it, countries with floating rates are the “least dirty shirt” in the markets.

Emerging markets have also changed their role. Historically, developing countries defaulted often and had high inflation. They had to borrow in dollars and to pay high yields. But now the finances of many developing countries are better than those of the rich world (see chart 3). Brazil and Mexico pay yields of less than 2% on five-year dollar-denominated debt.

It all adds up to a completely changed investment landscape. For the 25 years from 1982 to 2007, owning rich-world government bonds was almost a no-brainer. Yields fell steadily in line with inflation and there was no question of default. Now the market is much more complex. The players are more diverse and their motives more varied. The balance between risk and reward has also shifted against investors. In the past bondholders have not made money buying Treasury bonds on yields as low as 2%. At current levels of inflation, bond investors are getting negative real yields.

That may be the idea. Carmen Reinhart, Jacob Kirkegaard and Belen Sbrancia, three academics, have suggested that governments may use “financial repression”—forcing debts down the throats of captive buyers and keeping real rates negative so that inflation eliminates their debts. This trick worked after the second world war. The presence of “forced buyers” in the market such as central banks and commercial banks may enable it to be repeated.

But could governments really pull it off? Or are rich-world bond markets signalling that Japan is the more likely template? Ten-year yields there have been around 1% for much of the past decade, thanks to persistent deflation and slow growth.

This is a vital issue since a sudden surge in bond yields might wreck government finances, economic prospects and the outlook for other asset markets. “The unknown question is how much inflation central banks are willing to tolerate. Until that is settled, one cannot be sure about the outlook for bonds or other asset markets like equities,” says Manoj Pradhan at Morgan Stanley. For a supposedly risk-free asset it all adds up to a lot of risks.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/21547245

European M&A Has Yet to Take Wing

Two Swiss swallows don't make a summer. Switzerland's ABB and Roche have in the past week announced planned acquisitions of U.S. companies totaling $9.6 billion. Both deals fit the potential template for European mergers and acquisitions this year, as cash-rich companies seek growth outside the Continent. But overall, this has been the weakest January for European M&A since 2003, Dealogic figures show. With markets still uncertain and shareholders wary of companies splashing their cash, a deal surge may be a while off yet.

Growth is the key ingredient for would-be acquirers. ABB is buying electrical components maker Thomas & Betts because that market is growing twice as quickly in the U.S. as in Europe. Roche is bidding for Illumina because it sees personalized medicine as a fast-growing area for pharmaceutical companies. Both are buying assets it would take years to grow organically; similarly, resource-sector companies, which often find access to new assets hard, could prove willing buyers this year.

Given such opportunities, European companies have ample purchasing firepower. ABB and Roche are funding their acquisitions all or mostly from existing cash resources. At 7.7%, the cash-to-assets ratio for European companies is higher than the 6.8% level in 2007, before the financial crisis, according to Citigroup.

But given high volatility in share prices, companies and investors are unsure of the right price to pay for assets. Roche's hostile bid for Illumina was a hefty-looking 64% premium to the share price immediately beforehand, but a 44% discount to the company's price as recently as July. Amid the uncertainty, different uses for companies' cash are being urged. Shareholders want higher dividends or share buybacks, with dividend payout ratios close to 30-year lows, according to Barclays Capital. Cautious boards are keen for companies to hold cash amid the euro zone's continuing economic uncertainty.

A resolution to Europe's economic woes is needed before M&A activity truly takes flight. That would provide the market with greater stability and financial certainty. Deal activity could pick up in the second half of 2012, on an optimistic view of Europe's economy. Before then, deals that make strategic sense could occur sporadically. But even willing buyers will find conditions turbulent.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203920204577194964165200128.html?mod=WSJ_Heard_LEFTSecondNews

Freighter Oversupply Weighs on Shipowners and Banks

SINGAPORE — The skyscrapers and immaculate beaches of this seaport look out on one of the world’s largest parking lots: mile after mile of empty cargo ships, as far as the eye can see.

Similar fleets bob at anchor, with empty cargo holds, off the coasts of southeast Malaysia and Hong Kong. And dozens of newly built ships float empty near the giant shipyards of South Korea and China, their owners from all over the world reluctant to accept delivery during one of the worst markets ever for the global shipping industry.

As recently as six weeks ago large freighters that can carry bulk commodities like iron ore or grain were fetching charter rates of $15,000 a day. Now, brokers and owners say, the going rate is $6,000 a day. If any customers can even be found.

Although the fault lies partly with doldrums in the global economy, the bigger factor is a glut of new freighters. The oversupply is putting financial pressure on the shipowners that bought them and the already struggling European banks that financed many of the purchases.

Shipping industry leaders hold little hope of a quick recovery.

“If the tunnel is 2012, I can’t see any light at the end of it,” said Tim Huxley, the chief executive of Wah Kwong Maritime Transport Holdings, a Hong Kong-based shipping line with 29 bulk freighters and tankers.

Back during the global commodity boom, which continued through the spring of 2008, the world’s shipowners could hardly place orders for freighters fast enough. But because of the long lead times in shipbuilding, those vessels only now are being delivered by the hundreds — into a very different, much less robust international economy than when they were ordered.

For the shipping industry, the glut means not only lower charter fares, but also steep declines in the value of their vessels. The bigger losers, though, could eventually be some big European banks, many of which are already struggling with big losses on their holdings of government bonds from Greece, Italy and other heavily indebted European nations.

Basil Karatzas, the chief executive of Karatzas Marine Advisors, a ship brokerage and finance advisory firm in Manhattan, estimated that European banks hold about $500 billion in shipping loans on their books and face nearly $100 billion in losses to restructure them.

Just as American banks have grappled with huge loan losses for houses that are worth less than their mortgages, European banks face tens of billions of dollars in potential losses on shipping loans.

The banks’ “biggest concern is what is the write-off, and how do you treat it from an accounting point of view,” Mr. Karatzas said. “They do not know how to deal with these losses.”

Banks in Europe have long been the world leaders in ship financing because many of the biggest fleet owners are based there. But many have abruptly stopped lending money to shipowners. Some, as they scramble to muster capital to meet tougher reserve requirements demanded by European banking regulators, have even tried to raise money by asking some shipowners to prepay loans in exchange for a discount.

There is a scant secondary market for ship loans right now, except at deep discounts that banks are loath to agree to, according to shipping finance experts. Even for loans on which the vessel is still worth more than the mortgage, these experts say, the discount demanded is about 20 percent.

Commerzbank in Germany and the Lloyds Banking Group in Britain are among European institutions that have publicly said they were reducing their exposure to shipping loans.

Société Générale in France also has been looking for ways to reduce its holdings of shipping loans and instead focus on providing financial advice to shipping companies, according to two people with knowledge of the bank’s moves.

The bank declined to provide a comment on its shipping exposure ahead of the release of its annual financial report next month.

Shipowners, meantime, are nervously monitoring an industry benchmark, the Baltic Dry Index of bulk freighter charter rates, which has lost more than half its value since the start of the year. The index is now at its lowest level since January 2009, during the depths of the economic downturn after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

And as charter rates plummet, so do prices of the vessels themselves. A large tanker that sold for $137 million in early 2008, the Samho Dream, was repossessed by bankers late last year and sold last week in Hong Kong for just $28.3 million.

The world’s tonnage of large freighters is climbing by more than 10 percent a year, with 1,650 large freighters for bulk commodities expected to emerge from shipyards this year alone.

As long as the shipped tonnage of world trade is creeping up at an annual rate of only 2 to 3 percent a year, the oversupply can only grow more burdensome for the seaborne freight industry.

Making the glut especially acute right now is the fact that shipyards have delivered a large number of vessels to owners since the beginning of the year. Just as some car buyers wait to buy a car at the start of a model year — because it will hold its resale value longer — shipowners have traditionally taken delivery of as many vessels as possible in January, so as to have a full calendar year’s use before a vessel celebrates its first birthday, said Natasha Boyden, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald in New York.

Buyers who might be tempted to refuse delivery of vessels can lose their deposits, which are typically up to 40 percent of the contract price of the ship. But it is getting harder to borrow money from struggling banks to pay for the remaining 60 percent — particularly with resale values now much lower than the prices at which contracts were signed four or five years ago.

Freight rates are now close to operating costs for many bulk freighters, leaving almost nothing to pay the mortgage, so more old vessels may be scrapped in the coming years, which would eventually reduce oversupply.

Worldwide lending for ships totaled about $100 billion last year, down only slightly from previous years, according to industry estimates. But as much as three-quarters of last year’s loans were to refinance or restructure previous loans that the borrowers were struggling to repay, shipping finance executives said.

One big question is whether the plunge in freight rates might also signal further trouble in the global economy. World oil demand has been fairly flat lately because of weak economic growth, so there has been limited need for more tankers to haul oil.

The biggest market for bulk carriers lies in carrying iron ore to China’s voracious steel mills. But with a real estate slowdown in China undermining demand for steel, the annual growth rate of Chinese iron ore imports has abruptly slowed since October.

Harley Seyedin, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China, said that many construction projects had slowed to a crawl, with barely enough work being done for developers to persuade their bankers to continue financing projects already under way.

Yet the growing glut of vessels, combined with seasonal factors, could skew the reliability of shipping as a global economic indicator. Bad weather lately off Australia and Brazil, the two countries where bulk freighters are most likely to take on iron ore and other cargo, has made companies leery of chartering vessels and risk waiting for days for ports to reopen after storms.

Further confusing the picture is that the cost to ship a container from China to the United States or Europe actually jumped in the first two weeks of this year, as factories rushed to fill orders before shutting down for up to a month for the Chinese New Year, which began Monday. But that could be a misleading metric, because container rates temporarily surge every year for the last sailings before the Chinese New Year.

Even if world trade does not slow in the coming months, the shipping industry still has a long way to go before cargo demand can possibly catch up to capacity. Meantime, bulk freighters, container ships, tankers and refrigerator ships by the hundreds may continue to bob idly in the waves here, their hulls showing wide bands of paint that would be submerged if the vessels were fully laden.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/global/the-global-downturn-weighs-on-shipowners-and-european-banks.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=global

In Europe, a Conflict Over Bank Capital

LONDON — Europe’s banks and regulators are at odds about how financial institutions should increase their capital reserves.

Authorities want European banks to tap existing shareholders and reduce employee bonuses to find a combined $147 billion to increase their core Tier 1 ratios, a measure of a firm’s ability to weather financial shocks, to 9 percent by June. Citigroup estimates that Europe’s financial institutions, minus the Greek banks, had raised at least 40 billion euros, or $51 billion, as of the fourth quarter of 2011.

Banks, however, would prefer to sell or write down unprofitable operations, as well as adjust their balance sheets, to free up cash to meet the new requirements.

One solution could be to increase capital reserves through rights offerings, which allow existing shareholders to buy new stock at a discount. But volatility in the financial markets amid Europe’s sovereign debt crisis has damped investor interest.

Many banks are waiting on the outcome of the Italian bank UniCredit’s 7.5 billion euro rights issue, which closes at the end of this week. After initial investor skepticism, market participants say the Milan-based bank, which must raise almost 8 billion euros by June, is now expected to gain shareholder backing for the multibillion-euro capital increase.

“Everyone is looking at the UniCredit deal as a litmus test for future capital raisings,” said a senior investment banker from a leading bank in Europe, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly.

If other options are not attractive, some banks may eventually turn to local governments for a helping hand. Last year, the European Union created the European Financial Stability Facility, a 440 billion euro fund that can be used to shore up firms’ capital reserves.

Banks will soon find out what regulators think of their plans. Financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank of Germany and BNP Paribas of France, had to submit their recapitalization strategies to national regulators by Friday. The European Banking Authority will review the plans in early February, and regulators have the power to veto any capital-raising plan they don’t agree with.

Much of Europe is expected to enter recession this year, so authorities are likely to reject capital-raising efforts, like cutting lending to businesses, that reduce support for the European economy.

The banking authority has called on banks to raise the money through cuts in shareholder dividends and issuance of new stock. It has warned that the sale of any operation, particularly in banks’ home markets, that hurts business lending won’t be allowed.

“Regulators are asking for the impossible,” said Etay Katz, a banking regulatory partner at the law firm Allen & Overy in London. “They want banks to keep lending to the real economy, and there’s an expectation banks will have to swallow the bitter pill of offering new equity at times when investors’ appetite is negative.”

Nonetheless, some banks have been following authorities’ demands. Société Générale must raise 2.1 billion euros, and announced last November it was slashing bonuses and scrapping its 2011 shareholder dividend to meet the new regulatory requirements. It also plans to cut almost 1,600 jobs in its investment bank unit and has offloaded billions of euros of sovereign bonds to reduce its exposure to euro zone debt. As of the end of September, Société Générale’s core Tier 1 ratio stood at 9.5 percent.

Not every European bank, however, can rely on its own earnings. Many midsize banks, especially in Southern Europe, face deteriorating local economic conditions and rising customer defaults. In Spain, for example, authorities say the ratio of bad loans to bank lending has hit a 17-year high. And the European Union expects the country’s economy to grow a mere 0.7 percent this year, compared with 1.5 percent for the United States.

“The outlook is mostly negative for banks in countries like Spain, Italy and Portugal,” said James Longsdon, managing director in Fitch Ratings’ financial institutions group, in London.

Other banks are hoping the sale of so-called noncore assets in overseas markets will help to increase their capital reserves. The fire sale could be enormous. The European financial sector is expected to sell or write down more than $1.8 trillion in loan assets during the next decade, according to the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. That compares with just $97 billion from 2003 to 2010.

Last week, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which already has met the European Banking Authority’s capital requirements, sold its aircraft leasing business to a consortium of Japanese companies for $7.3 billion. Ireland’s nationalized Anglo Irish Bank also has offloaded $3.3 billion in commercial real estate loans in the United States to Wells Fargo. In all, the Irish bank wants to cut nearly $10 billion in American loans as part of a government requirement to reduce its assets and trim its operations.

Potential buyers, including American private equity firms, are lining up to take advantage, though analysts say the amount of assets up for sale will depress prices. That could reduce the impact on banks’ capital reserves. Local European politicians also may block deals that they believe will hurt domestic consumers.

“Banks may be restricted on deleveraging within Europe,” said Simon McGeary, managing director for European new products at Citigroup in London.

Banks also are restructuring their balance sheets to squeeze out extra capital. In a move known as liability management, banks can improve capital levels without raising additional funds. The strategy involves buying back or exchanging hybrid securities — investments that pay dividends like bonds, but can be converted into equity — at a discount from investors.

Under accounting rules, financial institutions can then book the difference between the original face value of the securities and the current discounted price as a profit toward core Tier 1 equity.

The strategy has been popular. Morgan Stanley estimates financial institutions, including Commerzbank of Germany and the Lloyds Banking Group of Britain, will raise a combined 8.7 billion euros by buying back, or exchanging, hybrid securities from investors.

The adjusting of companies’ balance sheets also includes so-called capital optimization, which involves tweaking banks’ back-office systems to free up funds to meet the capital requirements. Credit Suisse estimates that Spanish banks, which must raise a combined 26.1 billion euros, could free up more than 3 billion euros by fine-tuning how they use capital without raising any new funds.

“The only way for banks to succeed is to be more efficient with the limited capital available,” said Steve Culp, global managing director of the risk management practice at the consulting firm Accenture in London.

Banks, particularly in struggling southern European economies, may eventually have to turn to government bailouts. Deals already have been announced. In December, the National Bank of Greece and its local rival Piraeus Bank sold a combined 1.4 billion euros of shares to the government to increase their core Tier 1 ratios.

“There’s no magic bullet to this problem,” said Karl Goggin, a banking analyst at NCB Stockbrokers in Dublin. “The market has a finite appetite for banking stocks, so governments may have to step in.”

Source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/in-europe-a-conflict-over-bank-capital/

Working out of debt

The deleveraging process that began in 2008 is proving to be long and painful. Historical experience, particularly post–World War II debt reduction episodes, which the McKinsey Global Institute reviewed in a report two years ago, suggested this would be the case.¹ And the eurozone’s debt crisis is just the latest demonstration of how toxic the consequences can be when countries have too much debt and too little growth.

We recently took another look forward and back—at the relevant lessons from history about how governments can support economic recovery amid deleveraging and at the signposts business leaders can watch to see where economies are in that process. We reviewed the experience of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain in depth, but the signals should be relevant for any country that’s deleveraging.

Deleveraging: Where are we now?

The financial crisis highlighted the danger of too much debt, a message that has only been reinforced by Europe’s recent sovereign-debt challenges. And new McKinsey Global Institute research shows that the unwinding of debt—or deleveraging—has barely begun. Since 2008, debt ratios have grown rapidly in France, Japan, and Spain and have edged downward only in Australia, South Korea, and the United States. Overall, the ratio of debt to GDP has grown in the world’s ten largest economies.

Overall, the deleveraging process has only just begun. During the past two and a half years, the ratio of debt to GDP, driven by rising government debt, has actually grown in the aggregate in the world’s ten largest developed economies (for more, see sidebar, “Deleveraging: Where are we now?”). Private-sector debt has fallen, however, which is in line with historical experience: overextended households and corporations typically lead the deleveraging process; governments begin to reduce their debts later, once they have supported the economy into recovery.

Different countries, different paths

In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, all of which experienced significant credit bubbles before the financial crisis of 2008, households have been reducing their debt at different speeds. The most significant reduction occurred among US households. Let’s review each country in turn.

The United States: Light at the end of the tunnel

Household debt outstanding has fallen by $584 billion (4 percent) from the end of 2008 through the second quarter of 2011 in the United States. Defaults account for about 70 and 80 percent of the decrease in mortgage debt and consumer credit, respectively. A majority of the defaults reflect financial distress: overextended homeowners who lost jobs during the recession or faced medical emergencies found that they could not afford to keep up with debt payments. It is estimated that up to 35 percent of the defaults resulted from strategic decisions by households to walk away from their homes, since they owed far more than their properties were worth. This option is more available in the United States than in other countries, because in 11 of the 50 states—including hard-hit Arizona and California—mortgages are nonrecourse loans, so lenders cannot pursue the other assets or income of borrowers who default. Even in recourse states, US banks historically have rarely pursued borrowers.

Historical precedent suggests that US households could be up to halfway through the deleveraging process, with one to two years of further debt reduction ahead. We base this estimate partly on the long-term trend line for the ratio of household debt to disposable income. Americans have constantly increased their debt levels over the past 60 years, reflecting the development of mortgage markets, consumer credit, student loans, and other forms of credit. But after 2000, the ratio of household debt to income soared, exceeding the trend line by about 30 percentage points at the peak (Exhibit 1). As of the second quarter of 2011, this ratio had fallen by 11 percent from the peak; at the current rate of deleveraging, it would return to trend by mid-2013. Faster growth of disposable income would, of course, speed this process.

We came to a similar conclusion when we compared the experiences of US households with those of households in Sweden and Finland in the 1990s. During that decade, these Nordic countries endured similar banking crises, recessions, and deleveraging. In both, the ratio of household debt to income declined by roughly 30 percent from its peak. As Exhibit 2 indicates, the United States is closely tracking the Swedish experience, and the picture looks even better considering that clearing the backlog of mortgages already in the foreclosure pipeline could reduce US household debt ratios by an additional six percentage points.

As for the debt service ratio of US households, it’s now down to 11.5 percent—well below the peak of 14.0 percent, in the third quarter of 2007, and lower than it was even at the start of the bubble, in 2000. Given current low interest rates, this metric may overstate the sustainability of current US household debt levels, but it provides another indication that they are moving in the right direction.

Nonetheless, after US consumers finish deleveraging, they probably won’t be as powerful an engine of global growth as they were before the crisis. That’s because home equity loans and cash-out refinancing, which from 2003 to 2007 let US consumers extract $2.2 trillion of equity from their homes—an amount more than twice the size of the US fiscal-stimulus package—will not be available. The refinancing era is over: housing prices have declined, the equity in residential real estate has fallen severely, and lending standards are tighter. Excluding the impact of home equity extraction, real consumption growth in the pre-crisis years would have been around 2 percent per annum—similar to the annualized rate in the third quarter of 2011.

The United Kingdom: Debt has only just begun to fall

Three years after the start of the financial crisis, UK households have deleveraged only slightly, with the ratio of debt to disposable income falling from 156 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 to 146 percent in second quarter of 2011. This ratio remains significantly higher than that of US households at the bubble’s peak. Moreover, the outstanding stock of household debt has fallen by less than 1 percent. Residential mortgages have continued to grow in the United Kingdom, albeit at a much slower pace than they did before 2008, and this has offset some of the £25 billion decline in consumer credit.

Still, many UK residential mortgages may be in trouble. The Bank of England estimates that up to 12 percent of them may be in some kind of forbearance process, and an additional 2 percent are delinquent— similar to the 14 percent of US mortgages that are in arrears, have been restructured, or are now in the foreclosure pipeline (Exhibit 3). This process of quiet forbearance in the United Kingdom, combined with record-low interest rates, may be masking significant dangers ahead. Some 23 percent of UK households report that they are already “somewhat” or “heavily” burdened in paying off unsecured debt.² Indeed, the debt payments of UK households are one-third higher than those of their US counterparts—and 10 percent higher than they were in 2000, before the bubble. This statistic is particularly problematic because at least two-thirds of UK mortgages have variable interest rates, which expose borrowers to the potential for soaring debt payments should interest rates rise.

Given the minimal amount of deleveraging among UK households, they do not appear to be following Sweden or Finland on the path of significant, rapid deleveraging. Extrapolating the recent pace of UK household deleveraging, we find that the ratio of household debt to disposable income would not return to its long-term trend until 2020. Alternatively, it’s possible that developments in UK home prices, interest rates, and GDP growth will cause households to reduce debt slowly over the next several years, to levels that are more sustainable but still higher than historic trends. Overall, the United Kingdom needs to steer a difficult course that reduces household debt steadily, but at a pace that doesn’t stifle growth in consumption, which remains the critical driver of UK GDP.

Spain: The long unwinding road

Since the credit crisis first broke, Spain’s ratio of household debt to disposable income has fallen by 4 percent and the outstanding stock of household debt by just 1 percent. As in the United Kingdom, home mortgages and other forms of credit have continued to grow while consumer credit has fallen sharply.

Spain’s mortgage default rate climbed following the crisis but remains relatively low, at approximately 2.5 percent, thanks to low interest rates. The number of mortgages in forbearance has also risen since the crisis broke, however. And more trouble may lie ahead. Almost half of the households in the lowest-income quintile face debt payments representing more than 40 percent of their income, compared with slightly less than 20 percent for low-income US households. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in Spain is now 21.5 percent, up from 9 percent in 2006. For now, households continue to make payments to avoid the country’s conservative recourse laws, which allow lenders to go after borrowers’ assets and income for a long period.

In Spain, unlike most other developed economies, the corporate sector’s debt levels have risen sharply over the past decade. A significant drop in interest rates after the country joined the eurozone, in 1999, unleashed a run-up in real-estate spending and an enormous expansion in corporate debt. Today, Spanish corporations hold twice as much debt relative to national output as do US companies, and six times as much as German companies. Debt reduction in the corporate sector may weigh on growth in the years to come.

Signposts for recovery

Paring debt and laying a foundation for sustainable long-term growth should take place simultaneously, difficult as that may seem. For economies facing this dual challenge today, a review of history offers key lessons. Three historical episodes of deleveraging are particularly relevant: those of Finland and Sweden in the 1990s and of South Korea after the 1997 financial crisis. All these countries followed a similar path: bank deregulation (or lax regulation) led to a credit boom, which in turn fueled real-estate and other asset bubbles. When they collapsed, these economies fell into deep recession, and debt levels fell.

In all three countries, growth was essential for completing a five- to seven-year-long deleveraging process. Although the private sector may start to reduce debt even as GDP contracts, significant public-sector deleveraging, absent a sovereign default, typically occurs only when GDP growth rebounds, in the later years of deleveraging (Exhibit 4). That’s true because the primary factor causing public deficits to rise after a banking crisis is declining tax revenue, followed by an increase in automatic stabilizer payments, such as unemployment benefits.³ A rebound of economic growth in most deleveraging episodes allows countries to grow out of their debts, as the rate of GDP growth exceeds the rate of credit growth.

No two deleveraging economies are the same, of course. As relatively small economies deleveraging in times of strong global economic expansion, Finland, South Korea, and Sweden could rely on exports to make a substantial contribution to growth. Today’s deleveraging economies are larger and face more difficult circumstances. Still, historical experience suggests five questions that business and government leaders should consider as they evaluate where today’s deleveraging economies are heading and what policy priorities to emphasize.

1. Is the banking system stable?

In Finland and Sweden, banks were recapitalized and some were nationalized. In South Korea, some banks were merged and some were shuttered, and foreign investors for the first time got the right to become majority investors in financial institutions. The decisive resolution of bad loans was critical to kick-start lending in the economic- rebound phase of deleveraging.

The financial sectors in today’s deleveraging economies began to deleverage significantly in 2009, and US banks have accomplished the most in that effort. Even so, banks will generally need to raise significant amounts of additional capital in the years ahead to comply with Basel III and national regulations. In most European countries, business demand for credit has fallen amid slow growth. The supply of credit, to date, has not been severely constrained. A continuation of the eurozone crisis, however, poses a risk of a significant credit contraction in 2012 if banks are forced to reduce lending in the face of funding constraints. Such a forced deleveraging would significantly damage the region’s ability to escape recession.

2. Are structural reforms in place?

In the 1990s, each of the crisis countries embarked on a program of structural reform. For Finland and Sweden, accession to the European Union led to greater economies of scale and higher direct investment. Deregulation in specific industry sectors—for example, retailing—also played an important role.⁴ South Korea followed a remarkably similar course as it restructured its large corporate conglomerates, or chaebol, and opened its economy wider to foreign investment. These reforms unleashed growth by increasing competition within the economy and pushing companies to raise their productivity.

Today’s troubled economies need reforms tailored to the circumstances of each country. The United States, for instance, ought to streamline and accelerate regulatory approvals for business investment, particularly by foreign companies. The United Kingdom should revise its planning and zoning rules to enable the expansion of successful high-growth cities and to accelerate home building. Spain should drastically simplify business regulations to ease the formation of new companies, help improve productivity by promoting the creation of larger ones, and reform labor laws.⁵ Such structural changes are particularly important for Spain because the fiscal constraints now buffeting the European Union mean that the country cannot continue to boost its public debt to stimulate the economy. Moreover, as part of the eurozone, Spain does not have the option of currency depreciation to stimulate export growth.

3. Have exports surged?

In Sweden and Finland, exports grew by 10 and 9.4 percent a year, respectively, between 1994 and 1998, when growth rebounded in the later years of deleveraging. This boom was aided by strong export-oriented companies and the significant currency devaluations that occurred during the crisis (34 percent in Sweden from 1991 to 1993). South Korea’s 50 percent devaluation of the won, in 1997, helped the nation boost its share of exports in electronics and automobiles.

Even if exports alone cannot spur a broad recovery, they will be important contributors to economic growth in today’s deleveraging economies. In this fragile environment, policy makers must resist protectionism. Bilateral trade agreements, such as those recently passed by the United States, can help. Salvaging what we can from the Doha round of trade talks will be important. Service exports, including the “hidden” ones that foreign students and tourists generate, can be a key component of export growth in the United Kingdom and the United States.

4. Is private investment rising?

Another important factor that boosted growth in Finland, South Korea, and Sweden was the rapid expansion of investment. In Sweden, it rose by 9.7 percent annually during the economic rebound that began in 1994. Accession to the European Union was part of the impetus. Something similar happened in South Korea after 1998 as barriers to foreign direct investment fell. These soaring inflows helped offset slower private-consumption growth as households deleveraged.

Given the current very low interest rates in the United Kingdom and the United States, there is no better time to embark upon investments. Those for infrastructure represent an important enabler, and today there are ample opportunities to renew the aging energy and transportation networks in those countries. With public funding limited, the private sector can play an important role in providing equity capital, if pricing and regulatory structures enable companies to earn a fair return.

5. Has the housing market stabilized?

During the three historical episodes discussed here, the housing market stabilized and began to expand again as the economy rebounded. In the Nordic countries, equity markets also rebounded strongly at the start of the recovery. This development provided additional support for a sustainable rate of consumption growth by further increasing the “wealth effect” on household balance sheets.

In the United States, new housing starts remain at roughly one-third of their long-term average levels, and home prices have continued to decline in many parts of the country through 2011. Without price stabilization and an uptick in housing starts, a stronger recovery of GDP will be difficult,⁶ since residential real-estate construction alone contributed 4 to 5 percent of GDP in the United States before the housing bubble. Housing also spurs consumer demand for durable goods such as appliances and furnishings and therefore boosts the sale and manufacture of these products.

At a time when the economic recovery is sputtering, the eurozone crisis threatens to accelerate, and trust in business and the financial sector is at a low point, it may be tempting for senior executives to hunker down and wait out macroeconomic conditions that seem beyond anyone’s control. That approach would be a mistake. Business leaders who understand the signposts, and support government leaders trying to establish the preconditions for growth, can make a difference to their own and the global economy.

Source: https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Working_out_of_debt_2914