Tag Archives: ECB

Hilarity in NIRP Zone: Italian 2-Year Yield Still Near 0%, as New Government Proposes Haircut for Creditors and Alternate Currency, Markets on “Knife Edge”, by Wolf Richter

Posted on May 21, 2018 | 1 comment

The two parties that have formed a coalition government in Italy have a program that could well blow up Italian debt, and take the ECB and EU with it. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

The ECB’s Negative Interest Rate Policy has been the funniest monetary joke ever.

The distortions in the European bond markets are actually quite hilarious, when you think about them, and it’s hard to keep a straight face.

“Italian assets were pummeled again on mounting concern over the populist coalition’s fiscal plans, with the moves rippling across European debt markets,” Bloomberg wrote this morning, also trying hard to keep a straight face. As Italian bonds took a hit, “bond yields climbed to the highest levels in almost three years, while the premium to cover a default in the nation’s debt was the stiffest since October,” it said. “Investors fret the anti-establishment parties’ proposal to issue short-term credit notes – so-called ‘mini-BOTs’ – will lead to increased borrowing in what is already one of Europe’s most indebted economies.”

This comes on top of a proposal by the new coalition last week that the ECB should forgive and forget €250 billion in Italian bonds that it had foolishly bought.

The proposals by a government for a debt write-off, and the issuance of short-term credit notes as a sort of alternate currency are hallmarks of a looming default and should cause Italian yields to spike into the stratosphere, or at least into the double digits.

And so Italian government bonds fell, and the yield spiked today, adding to the prior four days of spiking. But wait…

Five trading days ago, the Italian two-year yield was still negative -0.12%. In other words, investors were still payingthe Italian government – whose new players are contemplating a form of default – for the privilege of lending it money. And now, the two-year yield has spiked to a positive but still minuscule 0.247% at the moment. By comparison, the US Treasury two-year yield is 2.57% over 10 times higher!

Here is the hilarious chart of the spiking Italian yield from the negative into the positive:

To continue reading: Hilarity in NIRP Zone: Italian 2-Year Yield Still Near 0%, as New Government Proposes Haircut for Creditors and Alternate Currency, Markets on “Knife Edge”

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Financial markets, Governments

Tagged , , , ,

“Cash Must Not Be Made the Scapegoat”, by Don Quijones

Posted on February 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

The use of cash isn’t just an economic matter, it’s a matter of civil liberties, privacy, and for some, survival. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

The proposed EU-wide cash restrictions could come into effect as early as this year. But defenders of physical cash have an unexpected ally in their struggle: Yves Mersch, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board. In a speech hosted by the Bundesbank last week, the Luxembourgian central banker exalted cash’s value as legal tender and heaped scorn on the oft-heard argument that its anonymity only helps criminals.

“Protection of privacy matters to all of us. Privacy protects people from the risk of a surveillance state and thought police,” he told his audience. “No particular link can be established statistically between cash and criminal activities. The focus must be on the fight against crime. Cash must not be made the scapegoat.”

One of the world’s biggest issuers of notes and coins, the Bundesbank was a fitting location for a speech on the virtues of physical money. In total, €592 billion of the €1.1 trillion of banknotes in circulation at the end of 2016 were issued by the Bundesbank.

Judging by recent statements, the Bundesbank wants to preserve this arrangement. Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann, who is hotly tipped to replace Mario Draghi as ECB president in 2019, has warned that it would be “disastrous” if people started to believe cash would be abolished — an oblique reference to the risk of negative interest rates and the escalating war on cash triggering a run on cash.

That didn’t stop five national governments — Cyprus, Bulgaria, Belgium, Portugal and Denmark — from approaching the ECB last year to consult on measures to limit the use of cash, according to Mersch. Meanwhile, Sweden is widely regarded as the most cashless society on the planet. “No cash accepted” signs are a common sight in shops and eateries as payments go digital and mobile, Bloomberg reports. A full 36% of the population never use cash, or just pay with it once or twice a year.

To continue reading: “Cash Must Not Be Made the Scapegoat”

Leave a comment

Posted in Currencies, Economy, Governments, Money

Tagged , ,

Forget Stocks, Look At EU Bonds – They Are The Real Problem, by Tom Luongo

Posted on January 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

European bonds may be the biggest central bank-blown bubble in the world. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

I’ve been banging on for months along with Martin Armstrong that the real problemoverhanging these markets is not an over-priced U.S. equity market.  That’s a sympton of a much bigger problem.

The real problem is an over-valued European sovereign bond market.

Looking at today’s bond market we see technical breakouts on yields to the upside across the continent.  And we’re not talking the usual suspects here, like Italy, Portugal or Greece.

No, we’re talking about Germany.

bunds

Note the cluster of resistance at 0.5%.  The market rejected taking yields on German 10 year debt above that level no less than six times in the past fifteen months.

Today, yields are at 0.685% and tomorrow is the end of the month.  Looks like we’re going to get a major bearish signal in German debt tomorrow.

While all the headlines are agog with stories about the Dow Jones dropping a couple hundreds points off an all-time high, German bunds are getting killed right before our eyes.

The Dow is simply a market overdue for a meaningful correction in a primary bull market.  And it’s a primary bull market brought on by a slow-moving sovereign debt crisis that will engulf Europe.

It’s not the end of the story.  Hell, the Dow isn’t even a major character in the story.

In fact, similar stories are being written in French 10 year debt, Dutch 10 year debt, and Swiss 10 year debt. These are the safe-havens in the European sovereign debt markets.

Meanwhile, Italian 10 year debt?  Still range-bound.  Portuguese 10 year debt?  Near all-time high prices.  The same this is there with Spain’s debt.  All volatility stamped out.

Why?

Simple.  The ECB.

To continue reading: Forget Stocks, Look At EU Bonds – They Are The Real Problem

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Debt, Governments

Tagged , ,

ECB Spawned Mass Culture of Financial Dependency that’s Now Very Hard to Undo, by Don Quijones

Posted on January 10, 2018 | Leave a comment

The ECB has become many European governments’ biggest creditor. That presents a problem, because sane private lenders will not lend to these government at the ECB’s ultra-low and negative interest rates. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

Right at the front of the monetary welfare queue is the government of Italy.

As the Eurozone economy continues to grow, pressure is rising on Europe’s biggest bond buyer, the ECB, to withdraw from the market, a process it has already begun. No one believes that more than the head of Germany’s Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, who recently told Spanish newspaper El Mundo that the ECB should soon set a date to end its multi-trillion euro asset-buying program.

”The prospects for the evolution of prices correspond to a return of inflation to a level sufficient to maintain the stability of prices,” he said. “For this reason, in my opinion, it would be justifiable to put a clear end to the buying of bonds by establishing a concrete date (for ending the program).”

Weidmann, who is hotly tipped to replace Draghi in 2019, has been one of the most vocal critics of the ECB’s QE program.

“Central banks have become the largest creditors of nation states,” Weidmann noted. “With our program of bond purchases, the financing conditions of Member States depend much more directly on monetary policy than in normal times. This could lead to political pressure on the ECB board to maintain lax monetary policy for longer than would in fact be justified from the perspective of price stability.”

Though it has lowered its asset purchases to €30 billion a month, the ECB has pledged to keep buying until at least September. But with the Eurozone economy growing faster than it has since the crisis and inflation comfortably above 1%, the ECB is widely expected to wind down the program thereafter. “If the economy continues to do so well, we could let the program run out in 2018,” ECB rate-setter Ewald Nowotny told Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

But what would that mean for the countries, companies, and banks that have grown to depend so much on the ECB’s extraordinary largesse?

To continue reading; ECB Spawned Mass Culture of Financial Dependency that’s Now Very Hard to Undo

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Governments

Tagged , ,

ECB Proposes End To Deposit Protection, by GoldCore

Posted on November 20, 2017 | 1 comment

A depositor in a bank has made a loan to the bank, he or she is an unsecured creditor. If the bank goes bust, the depositor joins the other creditors in line. If the government doesn’t guarantee the depositor, the depositors will get cents on the dollar or euro. From GoldCore at goldcore.com:

– Protect Your Savings With Gold: ECB Propose End To Deposit Protection
– New ECB paper proposes ‘covered deposits’ should be replaced to allow for more flexibility
– Fear covered deposits may lead to a run on the banks
– Savers should be reminded that a bank’s word is never its bond and to reduce counterparty exposure
– Physical gold enable savers to stay out of banking system and reduce exposure to bail-ins

EU deposit protection scheme

It is the ‘opinion of the European Central Bank’ that the deposit protection scheme is no longer necessary:

‘covered deposits and claims under investor compensation schemes should be replaced by limited discretionary exemptions to be granted by the competent authority in order to retain a degree of flexibility.’

To translate the legalese jargon of the ECB bureaucrats this could mean that the current €100,000 (£85,000) deposit level currently protected in the event of a bail-in may soon be no more.

But worry not fellow savers as the ECB is fully aware of the uproar this may cause so they have been kind enough to propose that:

“…during a transitional period, depositors should have access to an appropriate amount of their covered deposits to cover the cost of living within five working days of a request.”

So that’s a relief, you’ll only need to wait five days for some ‘competent authority’ to deem what is an ‘appropriate amount’ of your own money for you to have access to in order eat, pay bills and get to work.

To continue reading: ECB Proposes End To Deposit Protection

1 Comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Governments

Tagged ,

ECB Suffers from “Corporate Capture at its Most Extreme”, by Don Quijones

Posted on October 15, 2017 | Leave a comment

Like the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB) is a banking cartel. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

Many of these banks are implicated in the biggest financial crimes.

No single institution has more influence over the lives of European citizens than the European Central Bank. It sets the interest rates for the 19 Member States of the Eurozone, with a combined population of 341 million people. Every month it issues billions of euros of virtually interest-free loans to hard-up financial institutions while splashing €60 billion each month on sovereign and corporate bonds as part of its QE program, thanks to which it now boasts the biggest balance sheet of any central bank on Planet Earth.

Through its regulatory arm, the Single Supervisory Mechanism, it decides which struggling banks in the Eurozone get to live or die and which lucky competitor gets to pick up the pieces afterwards, without taking on the otherwise unknown risks.

In short, the ECB wields a bewildering amount of power and influence over Europe’s financial system. But how does it reach the decisions it makes? Who has the ECB’s institutional ear?

The ECB has 22 advisory boards with 517 seats in total that provide ECB decision-makers with recommendations on all aspects of EU monetary policy. A new report by the non-profit research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) reveals that 508 of the 517 available seats are assigned to representatives of private financial institutions.

In other words, 98% of the ECB’s external advisors have some sort of skin in the game. Of the nine seats not taken by the financial sector, seven have gone to non-financial companies such as German industrial giant Siemens and just two to consumer groups, according to the CEO report.

In response to questions by CEO, the ECB said that its advisory groups help it to gather information, effectively “discharge its mandate”, and “explain its policy decisions to citizens.”

The 508 finance industry representatives sitting on these 22 groups represent a total of 144 companies and trade associations and are made up of a variety of financial market agents including banks, investment funds, insurance firms, clearing houses and central securities depositories.

To continue reading: ECB Suffers from “Corporate Capture at its Most Extreme”

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Cronyism, Governments

Tagged ,

The ECB Morphs into the Mother of All “Bad Banks”, by Don Quijones

Posted on July 20, 2017 | Leave a comment

The European banking system is still one of the prime contenders to kick off the next global financial crisis. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

More than just a few “fallen angels.”

As part of its QE operations, the ECB continues to pour billions of freshly created euros each month into corporate bonds – and sometimes when it buys bonds via “private placements” directly into some of Europe’s biggest corporations and the European subsidiaries of non-European transnationals. Its total corporate bond purchases recently passed the €100 billion threshold. And it’s growing at a rate of roughly €7 billion a month. And it’s in the process of becoming the biggest “bad bank.”

When the ECB first embarked on its corporate bond-buying scheme in March 2016, it stated that it would buy only investment-grade rated debt. But shortly after that, concerns were raised about what might happen if a name it owned was downgraded to below investment grade. A few months later a representative of the bank put such fears to rest by announcing that it “is not required to sell its holdings in the event of a downgrade” to junk, raising the prospect of it holding so-called “fallen angels.”

Now, sixteen months into the program, it turns out that the ECB has bought into 981 different corporate bond issuances, of which 34 are currently rated BB+, so non-investment grade, or junk. And 208 of the issuances are non-rated (NR). So in total, a quarter of the bond issuances it purchased are either junk or not rated (red bars):

The ECB initially said it would only buy bonds that are “rated” — and rated investment grade. Thus having a quarter of the bonds on its books either junk or not rated represents a major violation of that promise.

To continue reading: The ECB Morphs into the Mother of All “Bad Banks”

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Debt, Governments, Uncategorized

Tagged ,

Fears of “Doom Loop” between Italian Banks and Government Bonds Resurface by Don Quijones

Posted on July 17, 2017 | 4 comments

What happens when insolvent banks hold the bonds of insolvent governments? That’s a question that will soon confront Europe. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

What will Draghi do? 

After two controversial bank rescue operations that stretched Europe’s bank resolution laws beyond recognition, things are beginning to look a little less desperate for Italy’s banking sector. The initial market reaction to the interventions has been overwhelmingly positive. For the first time in years Italian banks are leading Europe’s Stoxx 600 bank Index — upwards, not downwards.

Even the recent announcement of a capital raising and bad-loan sale plan by troubled bank Banca Carige was met with enthusiasm, sending its shares up 30%.

One of the Italian banking sector’s biggest problems — its sky-high bad loan ratio — will soon be under control, claimed Bank of Italy Governor Ignazio Visco in a recent speech to the Italian banking association. The interventions in Monte dei Paschi di Siena and the two Veneto-based banks, Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca, will take almost €50 billion of bad loans off their balance sheets, leaving about €275 billion in the system. Within a year Italy’s non-performing loan ratio will be down to an almost respectable 8% of total loans, Visco said.

To that end the government will create a new semi-publicly owned national asset management company (NAMC) that will help “develop the market for bad loans.” To lend the scheme legitimacy, European finance ministers rushed through approval of NAMCs for all Eurozone economies last week.

These NAMCs will vacuum up some of the nonperforming loans from bank balance sheets and sell them at a discount on the secondary market. According to Visco, the only way such a scheme would be “useful” is if it is applied on a purely voluntary basis and the assets are transferred at a price “not too far from their real economic value” — i.e. the value assigned to them by the banks. Untold billions of euros of taxpayer funds will be used to make up the difference between what market participants are willing to pay for the banks’ impaired assets and the price the banks want for them. This is the more covert part of Italy’s publicly funded bank rescue program.

To continue reading: Fears of “Doom Loop” between Italian Banks and Government Bonds Resurface

4 Comments

Posted in Banking, Debt, Governments

Tagged , ,

It’s Really Crazy What This ECB Has Wrought, by Wolf Richter

Posted on May 14, 2017 | Leave a comment

Europe is a borrower’s paradise and a saver’s hell. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

In the land of NIRP refugees and “Reverse Yankees,” who will get crushed?

At the end of the week, something special happened, something totally absurd but part of the new normal: the average yield of euro-denominated junk bonds – the riskiest, non-investment-grade corporate bonds – dropped to the lowest level ever: 2.77%.

April 26 had marked another propitious date in the annals of the ECB’s negative yield absurdity: the average euro-denominated junk bond yield had dropped below 3% for the first time ever.

By comparison, what is considered the most liquid and save debt, the 10-year US Treasury, carries a yield of 2.33%; the 30-year Treasury yield hovers at 3%.

This chart of the BofA Merrill Lynch Euro High Yield Index (data via FRED, St. Louis Fed), shows just how crazy this has gotten in the Eurozone:

It’s not like there’s deflation in the Eurozone, despite rampant scaremongering about it. The official inflation rate in April was 1.9% for the 12-month period. As this chart shows, it’s not likely to go away any time soon (via Trading Economics):

In other words, the average “real” junk bond yield (after inflation) according to the above two indices is now 0.87%. That’s the return bond-buyers get as compensation for handing their money for years to come to non-investment grade corporations – as per an average of the ratings by Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch – with an appreciable risks of default looming on the horizon.

Issuing junk bonds in euros is not just the prerogative of European companies. It includes issuance of junk-rated US companies that seek out this cheap money. “Reverse Yankees,” as these bonds are called, have become a large factor in euro-bond issuance.

And investors that accept a “real” compensation of only 0.87% per year to deal with these risks – have they gone nuts? You bet.

To continue reading: It’s Really Crazy What This ECB Has Wrought

Leave a comment

Posted in Debt, Economy, Government, Investing, Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

Revealed: ECB Secretly Hands Cash to Select Corporations, by Don Quijones

Posted on August 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

Why not cut out the middlemen? The ECB has been secretly buying bonds directly from corporations in private placements. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

Expanding its Program of Financial Darwinism

In June, the ECB began buying the bonds of some of the most powerful companies in Europe as well as the European subsidiaries of foreign multinationals. This pushed the average yield on euro investment-grade corporate debt to 0.65%. Large quantities of highly rated corporate debt with shorter maturities are trading at negative yields, where brainwashed investors engage in the absurdity of paying for the privilege of lending money to corporations. By August 12, the ECB had handed out over €16 billion in freshly printed money in exchange for corporate bonds.

Throughout, the public was given to understand that the ECB was buying already-issued bonds trading in secondary markets. But the public has been fooled.

Now it has been revealed by The Wall Street Journal that the ECB has also secretly been buying bonds directly from companies, thus handing them directly its freshly printed money.

It has been doing so via “private placements.” These debt sales are not open to the broader market. There’s no need for a prospectus. Only a small number of institutional investors participate. It allows companies to raise cash quickly, without jumping through the normal hoops. Private placements are not unusual. What’s new is that the ECB used them to buy bonds.

There have been two of these secretive private placements. And Morgan Stanley arranged them. The Wall Street Journal determined this by analyzing data from Dealogic and national central banks.

The two companies involved were the Spanish energy giants Repsol and Iberdrola. The Bank of Spain, now no more than a local branch of the ECB, was among the select buyers of a €500 million bond issued by Repsol. It is also the owner of part of a €200 million bond issued by Iberdrola. Among the advantages of issuing debt in a private placement is that it allows companies to raise cash quickly. According to Apostolos Gkoutzinis, head of European capital markets at law firm Shearman & Sterling, cited by The Wall Street Journal: because there is no prospectus or the other formalities required in a normal bond offering, “there won’t be any transparency, there won’t be a press release. It’s all done discreetly.”

Discretion is something at which the ECB excels. It’s how its most important constituent, the world´s biggest banks and hedge funds, have been able to book vast, risk-free profits by front-running the ECB’s future actions. A decision is made in secret to buy a certain type of asset or to lower interest rates. That decision is then communicated in secret meetings to hedge funds and certain other market participants so that they can buy into those positions and start pushing up prices (and pushing down yields). The ECB already got into hot water over this when it first came out.

The central bank is able to operate this way for two reasons: first, the general lack of public awareness and interest in what it does; and second, the blanket immunity it and its employees enjoy from virtually all forms of legal redress. As we recently reported, the ECB and all of its affiliated national central banks are, by law, above the law of national jurisdictions and answerable only to the European Court of Justice, provided they are fulfilling the functions and responsibilities assigned to them by EU law.

To continue reading: Revealed: ECB Secretly Hands Cash to Select Corporations

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Cronyism, Debt

Tagged