12/12/20: Hungary's risk improvement in peril

 My comment for Euromoney on changes in sovereign risk profile for Hungary: https://www.euromoneycountryrisk.com/article/b1pjjpq2xr2bfy/hungarys-risk-improvement-in-peril-as-it-bites-the-hand-that-feeds-it. 

17/5/20: Sovereign Default Risks and COVID19

Euromoney is covering sovereign default risks in Latin America in the wake of COVID19, with a comment from myself: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1320n1grh638l/argentinas-crisis-threatens-brazils-faltering-economy.

20/3/20: Euromoney on Risk Landscape Changes

Euromoney on changing risk landscape for global sovereigns: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1ktp0wqc12jyb/ecr-risk-experts-contemplate-another-financial-crisis. With a comment from myself.

7/7/18: Country Risk Survey: 1H 2018

Euromoney Country Risk quarterly survey is out, covering trends in sovereign risk for 1H 2018. With comments from myself, amongst others.

21/5/18: Risk experts take flight over Italy's political risk

Euromoney and ECR are covering the story of Italian political risk, with my comments on the rise of populism in Italy and its effects on sovereign risk with respect to the Italian Government formation negotiations: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b187w50chyvhbl/risk-experts-take-flight-over-italys-political-shock

14/3/2016: Foreign Investors, Sovereign Risks & Regulatory Clowns

Over 2012-2013, sovereign and corporate bonds markets started showing sigs of QE-related fatigue within the system, most commonly associated with periodically volatile trading spreads, term premia and risk spreads. In 2013, following the onset of the Fed-related “taper tantrum” many emerging markets spreads on their sovereign bonds widen dramatically, especially in response to rapid devaluations of their domestic currencies.

“This prompted market analysts to identify five of the worst hit economies as the “fragile five,” attributing their vulnerability to economic fundamentals, particularly to current account deficits.” Which is fine - current account is a reasonably important signal of the overall external balance in the economy, but… the but bit is that current account alone means little. Take for example Russia: back in 2013, the economy enjoyed record current account surpluses - so was a picture of rude health by the analysts criteria. Yet, within the economy there was already an apparent and fully recognised on-going structural slowdown.

Bickering over indicators validity aside, however, it would be nice to know which indicators and which risk models do investors flow when they decide to buy or sell emerging market bonds?

Traditionally, we think about two types of factors: “push” and “pull” factors, determining whether the emerging economy experiences capital inflows or outflows.

- “The push factors often relate to economic or financial developments in the global economy as a whole or in the advanced economies, notably the United States.”
- “The pull factors often relate to country-specific economic fundamentals in emerging markets”

Both push and pull factors seem to be important.

In analyzing returns on sovereign CDS contracts, the BIS paper looks at CDS returns “for 18 emerging markets and 10 advanced countries over 11 years of monthly data from January 2004 to December 2014.”

Findings in a nutshell:

• “Statistical tests for breaks in the movements of CDS returns suggest a break at the time of the eruption of the global subprime crisis in October 2008. This leads us to consider two subperiods separately, an “old normal” before the outbreak of the crisis and a “new normal” afterwards.”
• “In both the old normal and new normal, we seek to explain the variation of these [principal factors] loadings [onto risk premia] in terms of such fundamentals as debt-to-GDP ratios, fiscal balances, current account balances, sovereign credit ratings, trade openness, GDP growth and depth of the domestic bond market.”
• “In the old normal, the first risk factor alone explains about half of the variation in CDS returns…” 
• “This factor becomes more dominant in the new normal, in which it explains over three-fifths of the variation in returns.”
• “When it comes to how the different countries load on this factor, we find that that the commonly cited economic fundamentals have little influence on the country-specific loadings on the factor. Instead the single most important explanatory variable for the differences in loadings is a dummy variable that identifies whether or not a country is an emerging market.”

To summarise the BIS findings: “In the end, we find that CDS returns in the new normal move over time largely to reflect the movements of a single global risk factor, with the variation across sovereigns for the most part reflecting the designation of “emerging market”. There seems to be no “fragile five”; there are only emerging markets. While the emerging markets designation may serve to summarize many relevant features of sovereign borrowers, it is a designation that lacks the kind of granularity that we would have expected for a fundamental on which investors’ risk assessments are based. The importance of the emerging markets designation in the new normal suggests that index tracking behaviour by investors has become a powerful force in global bond markets.”

And the cherry on top of the proverbial pie? Why, here it goes: “Haldane (2014) has argued that in the world of international finance, the global subprime crisis and the regulations that followed made asset managers more important than banks. Miyajima and Shim (2014) show that even actively managed emerging market bond funds follow their benchmarks portfolios  quite closely. For the most part, when global investors invest in emerging markets, instead of picking and choosing based on country-specific fundamentals, they appear to simply replicate their benchmark portfolios, the constituents of which hardly change over time.”

Wait, what? All regulators are running around the world chasing the bad bankers (for their pre-2008 shenanigans), all the while the new threat has already migrated to asset management. The regulators and enforcers are busy bee-buzzing around courts and regulatory hearings chasing the elusive ‘signalling value’ of enforcing old rules onto the heads of the bankers. With little real outcome to show, I must add. … But the future culprits are not to be found amongst those who care to watch the fate of bankers unfolding in front of them.

In short, having exposed the farce of bond / CDS markets pricing risks based on a vague and vacuous designation of a country, the BIS paper inadvertently also exposed the massive futility of the financial regulators chasing their own tails trying to get past crises culprits to prevent new crises from happening, even though the future culprits don;t give a toss about the past culprits.

Dogs, tails, everything wagging everyone, and vice versa…


Full paper here: Amstad, Marlene and Remolona, Eli M. and Shek, Jimmy, “How Do Global Investors Differentiate between Sovereign Risks? The New Normal versus the Old” (January 2016). BIS Working Paper No. 541: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2722580

2/10/2013: Euro area sovereign crisis: predictable and reasonably priced?

• Can a model-based credit ratings system be used to predict future fiscal distress? Answer seems to be: yes.
• And have the fiscal downgrades of the euro area peripheral states been predictable in advance? Answer seems to be: yes.
• In other words, are the downgrades warranted by the actual pre-crisis dynamics in the economies? Answer seems to be: yes.
• Lastly, were there useful signals of stress build up that could have been considered by the policymakers prior to the onset of the crisis to alleviate or prevent the collapse of euro area peripherals? Answer seems to be: yes.

A new paper from CEPR (DP9665) titled "Sovereign credit ratings in the European Union: a model-based fiscal analysis" and authored by Vito Polito and Michael R. Wickens (September 2013: http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP9665) presents "a model-based measure of sovereign credit ratings derived solely from the fiscal position of a country: a forecast of its future debt liabilities, and its potential to use tax policy to repay these." [emphasis is mine]

The authors "use this measure to calculate credit ratings for fourteen European countries over the period 1995-2012. This measure identifies a European sovereign debt crisis almost two years before the official ratings of the credit rating agencies."

Ouch!

Now, the fourteen European (EU14) countries in the model-based calculations are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.

So the main findings are: "…The model-based credit ratings:

1. Anticipate the downgrades of Ireland, Spain, Portugal and the U.K. that occurred from the end of the 2010s; 
2. Downgrade Greece to the lowest rating (coinciding with its highest default probability) from at least mid 2000; 
3. Suggest that the Italian sovereign credit rating has been overstated. 
4. For all other countries, the model-based credit ratings are similar, but not identical, to the credit ratings provided by the CRAs 

"An implication of these results is that the cross-section distribution of the model-based sovereign credit rating is no longer concentrated within the investment grade prior 2010 and it starts changing significantly from 2008. This suggests that a model-based credit rating would have identified and signalled to market participants signs of the impending European sovereign debt crisis well before 2010, when the CRAs first reacted to the crisis."

And the kicker: "A by-product of the methodology proposed in this paper is the quantification of a country's debt limit (measured as its maximum borrowing capacity) and how this changes over time. The numerical analysis suggests that for most EU14 countries the scope for increasing borrowing capacity by increasing taxation is limited as actual tax revenues are similar to tax revenues maximized with respect to tax rates."

In other words, we've run out of the road for taxing our way out of the crisis.

"Our findings suggest that EU14 countries are more likely to be able to raise debt limits and achieve fiscal consolidation by reducing their expenditures than by increasing taxes."

Any wonder? Ok, check out the first link here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/10/2102013-low-tax-free-market-economy.html

24/7/2013: Q2 2013 CDS report: spotlight on Irish CDS performance

CMA published Q2 2013 report on CDS markets. Here's the top 30 table of riskiest sovereigns (ranked by probability of default over 5 years):

Note Ireland's significant improvement from Q1 2013, moving from 20th most risky (5 year CPD of 15.7% and mid-point CDS  at 188.64) to 27th most risky (5 year CPD down to 14.0% and CDS at 165.22).

14/2/2013: New Compensation Model for Rating Agencies

I wrote yesterday about two studies on the effectiveness of the rating agencies (link here). Another interesting study on the agencies and their performance was published in Spring 2012 issue of the Journal of Structured Finance (vol 81 number 1, pages 71-75). Authored by Malesh Kotecha, Sharon Ryan, Roy Weinberger and Michael DiGiacomo and titled Proposed Reform of the Rating Agency Compensation Model, the study looks at the current model of rating agencies compensation - the so-called issuer-pay model whereby issuer of securities being rated paying for the rating delivery - in light of the apparent conflicts of interest implicit in the model. The authors propose an alternative model based on fee levied on new issues and secondary markets trade. Fees would be deposited in a dedicated fund which will pay these out to the rating agencies. The agencies will be rotated on a performance basis, taking into account accuracy of their ratings over time.

The criticism of such an approach to compensation model - as noted by the authors - stems from 

-- the disincentive to rating agencies under the proposed changed model to innovate in ratings models development (higher potential errors etc)

-- the fact that the US bonds market is global in coverage and thus requires competitive pricing systems, 

-- difficulty of devising a merit-based rotating system and setting appropriate levels of fees; and

-- the new model introducing a transactions tax.

Overall, the weakest point of this proposal is undoubtedly its failure to consider the US markets role as global issuance platform with any transaction tax eroding cost competitiveness and the failure in recognising that global scope of rating agencies and the US markets also implies severe limits on new compensation model ability to capture the activities of these agencies.

13/2/2013: Rating Agencies Role & Effectiveness: 2 recent studies

In light of all the cases being filed against the rating agencies and in light of the general controversy surrounding them, here are two recent papers dealing with the topic of rating agencies performance and the links between their ratings and investors' decisions.

One interesting paper was published in the Journal of Banking & Finance )vol 36, number 5, May 2012, pages 1478-1491) by Thomas Mahlmann titled "Did Investors Outsource Their Risk Analysis to Rating Agencies? Evidence from ABS-CDOs".

The paper looks at the floating-rate tranches from collateralised debt obligations (CDO) backed by asset-backed securities to test whether yield spreads at the point of issuance (origination) act as good predictors of future performance. The paper found that, once we control for rating at issuance and other deal-specific data, yield spreads do indeed indicate future performance. However, this result is primarily due to tranches that were initially rated below AAA.

The study concludes that at the issuance / origination, investors did not rely only on ratings, when pricing the CDOs studied. The study econometric evidence also indicates that ratings were inadequate for CDOs because these instruments are much riskier than corporate bonds.

Another paper, published in the International Journal of Finance and Economics (March 2012) by Eduardo Cavallo, Andrew Powell and Roberto Rigobon, titled "Do Credit Rating Agencies Add Value? Evidence from the Sovereign Rating Business" look at the credit downgrades made during and after the financial crises asking whether rating agencies opinions provide any incremental information to the market.

The answer to the question is yes. Rating agencies opinions on sovereign risks do explain a portion of variation in three macroeconomic variables, relevant to the market: exchange rates, stock market indices and future sovereign bond spreads, once the authors control for observed bond spreads.

The study also found that rating agencies upgrades (downgrades) are correlated with:

1. decreases (increases) in the spreads one day forward;
2. increases (decreases) in the stock market;
3. nominal exchange rate appreciation (depreciation) relative to the USD.

Top level conclusion: the ratings do contain information about specific credit and the rating's informational content is in addition to other publicly available market data, such as credit spreads.