Tag Archives: EU

Why the Eurozone and the Euro Are Both Doomed, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on May 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

One currency cannot serve nations with diametrically opposed economic goals. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Papering over the structural imbalances in the Eurozone with endless bailouts will not resolve the fundamental asymmetries.

Beneath the permanent whatever it takes “rescue” by the European Central Bank (ECB) lie fundamental asymmetries that doom the euro, the joint currency that has been the centerpiece of European unity since its introduction in 1999.

The key imbalance is between export powerhouse Germany, which generates huge trade surpluses, and its trading partners, which run large trade and budget deficits, particularly Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

Those outside of Europe may be surprised to learn that Germany’s exports are roughly equal to those of China ($1.2 trillion), even though Germany’s population of 82 million is a mere 6% of China’s 1.3 billion. Germany and China are the world’s top exporters, while the U.S. trails as a distant third.

Germany’s emphasis on exports places it in the so-called mercantilist camp, countries that depend heavily on exports for their growth and profits. Other (nonoil-exporting) nations that routinely generate large trade surpluses include China, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

While Germany’s exports rose an astonishing 65% from 2000 to 2008, its domestic demand flatlined near zero. Without strong export growth, Germany’s economy would have been at a standstill. The Netherlands is also a big exporter (trade surplus of $33 billion) even though its population is relatively tiny, at only 16 million.

The “consumer” countries, on the other hand, run large current-account (trade) deficits and large government deficits. Italy, for instance, has a $55 billion trade deficit and a budget deficit of about $110 billion. Total public debt is a whopping 115.2% of GDP.

Spain, with about half the population of Germany, has a $69 billion annual trade deficit and a staggering $151 billion budget deficit. Fully 23% of the government’s budget is borrowed.

To continue reading: Why the Eurozone and the Euro Are Both Doomed

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Italy and the euro cannot be saved by mass-immigration, by Gefira

Posted on May 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

In the fantasy world of Europe’s powers that be, declining birth rates would be offset by migration from the Middle East and Africa. It hasn’t worked out as planned. The migrants have few skills, don’t know the languages, and often prefer to live off European welfare states rather than contribute to them. From Gefira at gefira.org:

The ongoing euro crisis has never been and will never be solved. The native European populations are shrinking and this will have a consequence for the economy, production and public finance. The demographic decline is the single most important economic phenomenon. We do not doubt that the annual visitors to the Global Economic Forum in Davos are fully aware of it: they know that the European and East Asian populations are decreasing and that 18 of the 20 top economies will never experience sustainable growth again. The economic press and mainstream analysts somehow do not get it and still believe that countries that will see their native population shrinking by 30% in the next thirty years can increase their GDP.

Italy is the next epicenter of the demographic crisis. The ongoing euro problems and the orchestrated mass migration into Italy are closely related. Italian population began to dwindle last year, a situation that has never happened in modern history. Without immigration, the Italian working-age population will drop by at least 30% before the middle of the century. If the productivity does not change and even if the Italians are able to balance their budget, the consequences are unsolvable.

The Italian GDP will be smaller and smaller in proportion to the fall in the number of the working-age population. Every working-age person in Italy is burdened with a sixty-thousand-euro public debt and that amount will grow on average by nearly a thousand euros a year because more people are leaving the working force than entering. The debt to GDP ratio will be 200 percent by mid-century. We did not yet factor in the outflow of young people that are looking for employment in other European countries.

This scenario gives a good indication of the problem Italy faces. In the coming years it is expected that the productivity will go up, but the same holds good for the national debt which increased by 15 percent since 2012. All Western economies have arrived at the point where productivity has to compensate for the decline in their populations. Italy is the world’s ninth economy and is on a trajectory that in the long run will end in an economic implosion comparable to the 1998 financial crisis in Argentina, number 21 on the world GDP list.


To continue reading: Italy and the euro cannot be saved by mass-immigration 

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The EU Strikes Back – Italy Coalition Rejected, by Thomas Luongo

Posted on May 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

The EU is showing Italians who runs Italy. From Tom Luong0 at tomluongo.me:

Italian President Sergio Mattarella just blew up the European Union.  His refusal of the coalition agreement between The League and Five Star Movement threw the best chance for the EU to face its burgeoning political crisis before it became a full-blown sovereign debt crisis.

With U.S. and U.K. markets closed today the full force of the damage done by the EU’s Hail Mary to prevent the Italians forming a government to their specification is actually muted.  Things like this always happen on a weekend where the powers that be have enough time to figure out a messaging game plan and reassure markets they’ve got everything under control.

But, let’s round up a bit shall we?

Italian bonds off 25 basis points (!). The euro flirting with $1.16. Spanish and Portuguese debt sold hard, off 5 to 12 basis points.  Gold is off a few dollars.

Mattarella, nominally, did this because he didn’t like the choice of Finance Minister, a man who was in favor of Italy leaving the euro.  Whatever, he found an excuse.  And someone in one of Berlin, Brussels or Washington told him to give a non-hacker the reins to try to form a government.

As Zerohedge reports this morning, that’s simply a non-starter. There is no way that the Italian parliament will approve another technocratic Vishy government on Italy, circa 2011 and Berlusconi’s ouster during the last flare up of Europe’s intractable debt problem.

No, this has to be about something else.  This is simply yet another instance of Europe kicking the can down the road.

Sanctions Uber Alles

Look, at the risk of sounding like a guy with a hammer looking to pound in some nails, I have to think that the re-authorization of the EU sanctions on Russia in July is what prompted this desperation move.

But, if a re-vote in Italy can be put off until August (convenient that) then that gives the Trump Administration another six months to exert maximum pressure on our “allies” on trade and tariffs.

It makes sense that Washington is mostly behind this, but don’t underestimate the stupidity of people like Donald Tusk and Jan-Claude Juncker who will literally burn the continent to the ground before giving up their dream of an Europe united in their Orwellian Nightmare.

To continue reading: The EU Strikes Back – Italy Coalition Rejected

 

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NIRP’s Revenge: Italian Bonds Plunge, Worst Day in Decades, by Wolf Richter

Posted on May 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

Some market reactions to the Italian economic and political crisis, from Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Markets wail and gnash their teeth as “normalization” of Italian yields sets in.

On Tuesday, Italian bonds had their worst day in Eurozone existence, even worse than any day during the worst periods of the 2011 debt crisis. And this comes after they’d already gotten crushed on Monday, and after they’d gotten crushed last week. And this happened even as the ECB is carrying on its QE program, including the purchase of Italian government bonds; and even as it pursues its negative-interest-rate policy (NIRP). As bond prices plunge, yields spike by definition, and the spike in the two-year yield was spectacular, going from 0.3% on Monday morning to 2.73% on Tuesday end of day:

But note that until May 26, the two-year yield was still negative as part of the ECB’s interest rate repression. On that fateful day, the two-year yield finally crossed the red line into positive territory.

To this day, it remains inexplicable why the ECB decided that Italian yields with maturities of two years or less should be negative – that investors, or rather pension beneficiaries, etc., who own these misbegotten bonds, would need to pay the Italian government, one of the most indebted in the world, for the privilege of lending it money. But that scheme came totally unhinged just now.

The 10-year Italian government bond yield preformed a similar if not quite as spectacular a feat. Over Monday and Tuesday, it went from 2.37% to 3.18%:

But here’s the thing: Italian bonds – no matter what maturity – should never ever have traded with a negative yield. Their yields should always have been higher than US yields, given that the Italian government is in even worse financial shape than the US government. Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 131%, and more importantly, it doesn’t even control its own currency and cannot on its own slough off a debt crisis by converting it into a classic currency crisis, which is how Argentina is dealing with its government spending. The central bank of Argentina recently jacked up its 30-day policy rate to 40% to keep the peso from collapsing further.

To continue reading: NIRP’s Revenge: Italian Bonds Plunge, Worst Day in Decades

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Hotel Europa, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on May 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” The EU bears a striking resemblance to the Eagles legendary hotel. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

On Friday, in This is the End of the Euro, I said: The euro has become a cage, a prison for the poorer brethren. The finance minister proposed by 5-Star/Lega and refused by Italian president Mattarella, Paolo Savona, has called the euro a German cage.

There are now stories spreading that the coalition, Savona first of all, were secretly planning an exit from the euro. A series of slides Savona prepared in 2015 on how to exit the euro is used as evidence of that secret plan. But the slides are not secret. Yes, he has said that it’s good to have a plan to leave ‘if necessary’. But that’s not the same as secretly planning such a move.

Every country should have such a plan, and you would hope they do. A government that doesn’t is being very irresponsible. But it’s true, this is how both the EU and the euro have been designed: not just as a prison, but as a prison without any doors or windows. No way to get out. And that will prove to be its fatal flaw.

It has more such flaws, for sure. The inequality of its members, which allows for the richer to feed on the poorer, is a big one. The US founders were smart enough to provide for transfer payments from rich to poorer, the EU founders couldn’t be bothered with that lesson. They must have studied it, though, and rejected it.

Credit were credit’s due: Yanis Varoufakis said it best when he compared the EU to the Eagles’ Hotel California. A few lines:

Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice
And she said “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast

Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like
But you can never leave!”

The EU was set up as some kind of eternal prison, a concept most familiar to us in the way Christian churches depict Hell, or the ancient Greek mythological story of Prometheus, who, as punishment for providing man with fire, was condemned by Zeus to being tied to a rock, with an eagle feeding on his liver every day, for eternity.

To continue reading: Hotel Europa

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Italy’s Pro-EU President Flouts Voters, by Soeren Kern

Posted on May 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

Political and financial chaos reign in Italy. From Soeren Kern at thegatestoneinstitute.org:

  • The political situation reflects the stranglehold on power wielded by the pro-EU establishment, which is evidently determined to preserve economic austerity at the expense of democracy.
  • “We need to prepare a plan B to get out of the euro if necessary… the other alternative is to end up like Greece.” — Paolo Savona, a former industry minister who has called Italy’s entry into the euro a “historic mistake.”
  • “In Italy, there is a problem of democracy. In this country, you can be a convicted criminal, convicted for tax fraud, under investigation for corruption and be a minister… but if you criticize Europe, you cannot be the Minister of the Economy in Italy.” — M5S leader Luigi Di Maio.

Italy’s new populist government-in-waiting resigned on May 28 after its choice of a eurosceptic finance minister was rejected by the country’s pro-EU president — who instead asked an unelected technocrat to form a pro-EU government.

The political wrangling ends a bid by Italy’s two anti-establishment parties — the left-leaning Five Star Movement (M5S) and the center-right League (Lega) — to form a populist coalition government, which would have been the first of its kind in Europe.

The political situation reflects the stranglehold on power wielded by the pro-EU establishment, which is evidently determined to preserve economic austerity at the expense of democracy.

Italian president Sergio Mattarella refused to accept the nomination for finance minister of Paolo Savona, an 81-year-old former industry minister who has called Italy’s entry into the euro a “historic mistake.”

In his latest book, “Like a Nightmare and a Dream” (Come un incubo e come un sogno), Savona called the euro a “German cage” and warned that “we need to prepare a plan B to get out of the euro if necessary… the other alternative is to end up like Greece.”

Mattarella, who was installed by a previous pro-EU government, said that the “uncertainty over our position in the euro has alarmed Italian and foreign investors who purchased our government bonds and invested in our companies.” He added that “membership of the euro is a fundamental choice for the future of our country and our young people.”

To continue reading: Italy’s Pro-EU President Flouts Voters

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Which Banks Are Most Exposed to Italy’s Sovereign Debt? (Other than the Horribly Exposed Italian Banks), by Don Quijones

Posted on May 27, 2018 | Leave a comment

Italy is moving up fast on the outside in the race to see which dicey situation sets off the next global financial crisis. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

“Doom loop” begins to exact its pound of flesh.

Risk. Exposure. Contagion. These are three words we’re likely to hear more and more in relation to Europe, as the Eurozone’s debt crisis returns.

On Friday, Italy’s 10-year risk premium — the spread between Italian ten-year bond yields and their German counterparts — surged almost 20 basis points to 212 basis points. This was the highest level since May 2017, when a number of Italy’s banks, including third biggest bank Monte dei Pacshi di Siena (MPS), were on the brink of collapse and were either “resolved” or bailed out. Now, they’re all beginning to wobble again.

Shares of bailed-out and now majority-state-owned MPS, whose management the new government says it would like to change, are down 20% in the last two weeks’ trading. The shares of Unicredit and Intesa, Italy’s two biggest banks, have respectively shed 10% and 18% during the same period.

One of the big questions investors are asking themselves is which banks are most exposed to Italian debt.

A recent study by the Bank for International Settlementsshows Italian government debt represents nearly 20% of Italian banks’ assets — one of the highest levels in the world. In total there are ten banks with Italian sovereign-debt holdings that represent over 100% of their tier-1 capital (which is used to measure bank solvency), according to research by Eric Dor, the director of Economic Studies at IESEG School of Management.

The list includes Italy’s two largest lenders, Unicredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, whose exposure to Italian government bonds represent the equivalent of 145% of their tier-1 capital. Also listed are Italy’s third largest bank, Banco BPM (327%), Monte dei Paschi di Siena (206%), BPER Banca (176%) and Banca Carige (151%).

In other words, despite years of the ECB’s multi-trillion euro QE program, which is scheduled to come to an end soon, the so-called “Doom Loop” is still very much alive and kicking in Italy. The doom loop is when weakening government bonds threaten to topple the banks that own the bonds, and in turn, the banks start offloading them, which causes these bonds to fall further, thus pushing the government to the brink. The doom loop is a particular problem in the Eurozone since a member state doesn’t control its own currency, and cannot print itself out of trouble, which leaves it exposed to credit risk.

To continue reading: Which Banks Are Most Exposed to Italy’s Sovereign Debt? (Other than the Horribly Exposed Italian Banks)

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