4/6/18: Italy is a TBTF/TBTS Problem for ECB

In my previous post, I talked about the Too-Big-To-Fail Euro state, #Italy - a country with massive debt baggage that is systemic in nature.

Here is Project Syndicate view from Carmen Reinhart: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/italy-sovereign-debt-restructuring-by-carmen-reinhart-2018-05.

An interesting graph, charting a combination of the official Government debt and Target 2 deficits accumulated by Italy:

Quote: "With many investors pulling out of Italian assets, capital flight in the more recent data is bound to show up as an even bigger Target2 hole. This debt, unlike pre-1999, pre-euro Italian debt, cannot be inflated away. In this regard, it is much like emerging markets’ dollar-denominated debts: it is either repaid or restructured."

The problem, of course, is the ECB position, as mentioned in my article linked above. It is more than a reputational issue. Restructuring central bank liabilities is easy and relatively painless when it comes to a one-off event within a large system, like the ECB. So no issue with simply ignoring these imbalances from the monetary policy perspective. However, the ECB is a creature of German comfort, and this makes any restructuring (or ignoring) of the Target 2 imbalances a tricky issue for ECB's ability to continue accumulating them vis-a-vis all other debtor states of the euro area. Should a new crisis emerge, the ECB needs stable (non-imploding) Target 2 balance sheet to continue making an argument for sustaining debtor nations. This means not ignoring Italian problem.

Here is the picture mapping out the problem:

Source: http://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/servlet/desis?node=1000004859

Reinhart warns, in my opinion correctly, "In the mildest of scenarios, only Italy’s official debt – held by other governments or international organizations – would be restructured, somewhat limiting the disruptions to financial markets. Yet restructuring official debt may not prove sufficient. Unlike Greece (post-2010), where official creditors held the lion’s share of the debt stock, domestic residents hold most of Italy’s public debt. This places a premium on a strategy that minimizes capital flight (which probably cannot be avoided altogether)."

In other words, as I noted years ago, Italy is a 'Too-Big-To-Fail' and a 'Too-Big-To-Save' or TBTF/TBTS problem for the euro area.

4/6/18: Italy's Problem is Europe's Problem

My article on Italian (and Spanish and Dutsche Bank) mess in Sunday Business Post: https://www.businesspost.ie/business/italys-problem-europes-problem-417945.

Unedited version of the article here:

This fortnight has been a real roller-coaster for the European markets and politics. Only two weeks ago, I wrote about the problems of rising political populism in Italy and Spain as the signals of a broader trend across the block’s member states. This week, in Spain a no confidence motion in Mariano Rajoy’s rule played a side show to Rome’s drama.

The timeline of events in Italy provides the background to this week’s lessons.

The country has been governed by a lame-duck executive since mid-2016. Fed up with Rome’s gridlock, in March 2018 general election, Italians endorsed a parliament split between the populist-Left M5S and the far-Right group of parties led by the League. Month and a half of League-M5S negotiations have produced a shared policies platform, replete with radical proposals for reshaping country’s Byzantine tax and social welfare systems. The platform also contained highly controversial proposals to force the ECB to write down EUR250 billion worth of Government debt, a plan for restructuring fiscal rules to allow the country to run larger fiscal deficits, and a call for immigration system reforms.

On Monday, the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, a loyal Euro supporter, vetoed the League-M5S candidate for the economy ministry, Eurosceptic Paolo Savona. The result was resignation of the League-M5S Prime Minister-designate, Giuseppe Conte, and a threat of an appointment of the unpopular technocrat, Carlo Cottarelli, an ex-IMF economist nicknamed Mr. Scissors for his staunch support for austerity, as a caretaker Prime Minister. By Thursday night, Conte was back in the saddle, with a new coalition Government agreed and set to be sworn in on Friday.

Crisis avoided? Not so fast.

Risk Blow Out

The markets followed the political turns and twists of the drama. On Tuesday, Italian bonds posted their worst daily performance in over 20 years. The spike in the 2-year bond yield was spectacular, going from 0.3 percent on Monday morning to 2.73 percent on Tuesday, before slipping back to 1.26 percent on Thursday. The 10-year Italian bond yield leaped from 2.37 percent to 3.18 percent within the first two days, falling to 2.84 percent a day after.

Source: FT

To put these bond yields’ movements into perspective, at the week’s peak yields, the cost of funding Italian EUR2.256 trillion mountain of Government debt would have risen by EUR45 billion per annum - more than the forecast deficit increases under the reforms proposed in the League-M5S programme.

Thus, despite the immediate crisis yielding to the new Coalition, a heavy cloud of uncertainty still hangs over the Euro area’s third largest member state. Should the new Government fail to deliver on a unified platform built by an inherently unstable coalition, the new election will be on offer. This will likely turn into a plebiscite on Italy’s membership in the Euro. And it will also raise a specter of another markets meltdown.


The Italian Contagion Problem

The lessons from this week’s spike in political uncertainty are three-fold. All are bad for Italy and for the entire euro area. Firstly, after years of QE-induced amnesia, the investment markets are now ready to force huge volatility and rapid risk-repricing into sovereign bonds valuations. Secondly, despite all the talk in Brussels and Rome about the robustness of post-2011 reforms, the Italian economy remains stagnant, incapable of withstanding any significant uptick in the historically-low borrowing costs that prevailed over recent years, with its financial system still vulnerable to shocks. Thirdly, the feared contagion from Italy to the rest of the Eurozone is not a distant echo of the crises past, but a very present danger.

Italy’s debt mountain is the powder keg, ready to explode. The IMF forecasts from April this year envision Italian debt-to-GDP ratio dropping from 131.5 percent at the end of 2017 to 116.6 percent in 2023. However, should the average cost of debt rise just 200 basis points on IMF’s central scenario, hitting 4 percent, the debt ratio is set to rise to 137 percent. This Wednesday bond auction achieved a gross yield of 3 percent on 10-year bonds. In other words, Italy’s fiscal and economic dynamics are unsustainable under a combination of higher risk premia, and the ECB monetary policy normalisation. The risk of the former was playing out this week and will remain in place into 2019. The latter is expected to start around November-December and accelerate thereafter.

With the government crisis unfolding, the probability of Italy leaving the Euro within 12 months, measured by Sentix Italexit index jumped from 3.6 percent at the end of the last week to 12.3 percent this Tuesday before moderating to 11 percent at the end of Thursday. This puts at risk not only Italian Government bonds, but the private sector debt as well, amounting to close to EUR2 trillion. A rise in the cost of this debt, in line with Government debt risk scenarios, will literally sink economy into a recession.

As Italian Government bonds spreads shot up, other European markets started feeling the pain. Based on the data from Deutsche Bank Research, at the start of 2018, foreign banks, non-bank investors and official sector, including the Euro system, held ca 48 percent of the Italian Government debt.  In Spain and Portugal, this number was closer to 65 percent. In other words, the risk of falling bonds prices is both material and broadly distributed across the European financial system for all ‘peripheral’ Euro states.

Source: DB Research

As a part of its quantitative easing program, the ECB has purchased some EUR250 billion worth of Italian bonds. A significant uptick in risk of Italy’s default on these bonds will put political pressure on ECB. Going forward, Frankfurt will face greater political uncertainty in dealing with the future financial and fiscal crises.

Research from the Bank for International Settlements puts Italian banks’ holdings of Government bonds at roughly EUR 450 billion. Ten largest Italian banks have sovereign-debt exposures that exceed their Tier-1 capital. As the value of these bonds plunges, the solvency risks rise too. Not surprisingly, over the last two weeks, shares of the large Italian banks fell 10-20 percent. These declines in equity prices, in turn, are driving solvency risks even higher.

Beyond the Italian banks, French financial institutions held some EUR44 billion worth of Italian bonds, while Spanish banks were exposed to EUR29 billion, according to the European Banking Authority.

The second order effects of the Italian risk contagion play through the other ‘peripheral’ euro area bonds. As events of this week unfolded, in line with Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece have experienced relatively sharp drops in their bonds values. All three are also subject to elevated political uncertainty at home, made more robust by the Italian crisis.

Thus, if the Italian government bond yields head up, banks’ balance sheets risks mount through both, direct exposures to the Italian Government bonds, and indirect effects from Italian contagion on the broader government debt markets, as well as to the private sector lending.

At the end of this week, all indication are that the Italian contagion crisis is receding. The new risk triggers are shifting out into late 2018 and early 2019. The uneasy coalition between two populist moments, the M5S and the League, is unlikely to survive the onslaught of voter dissatisfaction with the state of the economy and continued immigration crisis. At the same time, the coalition will be facing a highly skeptical EU, hell-bent on assuring that M5S-League Government does not achieve much progress on its reforms. All in, the new Government has between six and twelve months to run before we see a new election looming on the horizon.

The Italian crisis might be easing, but it is not going away any time soon. Neither the Spanish one. Oh, and with a major credit downgrade from the Standard & Poor’s and the U.S. Fed, here goes the systemic behemoth of European finance, the Deutsche Bank.

21/10/2013: Uneasy Links: Banks and Sovereign Bonds Exposures

IMF recently warned about growing own-sovereign exposures of European banks when it comes to government bonds holdings. FT echoed with an article: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9b6fb558-3270-11e3-b3a7-00144feab7de.html

Per FT:

• "...Government bonds accounted for more than a 10th of Italian banks’ total assets at the end of August, the last month for which data are available. That is up from 6.8 per cent at the beginning of 2012, according to data from the European Central Bank."
• "In Spain the proportion has risen to 9.5 per cent, up from 6.3 per cent over the same period…"
• "… in Portugal it has increased to 7.6 per cent from 4.6 per cent."

"By far the majority of the increases – which occurred steadily month-on-month – are in holdings of bonds issued by banks’ own governments." So overall, "Government bonds, as a percentage of total eurozone bank assets, have grown to 5.6 per cent from 4.3 per cent since the beginning of 2012."

Lest we forget, there is a strong momentum building up in Europe to do something about the problem of European banks over-reliance on sovereign bonds - a momentum driven by lower debt countries with significant exposures to Target 2 imbalances. At the end of September, ECB's Governing Council Member Jen Weidmeann said that "The time is ripe to address the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures," Weidmann wrote in an opinion piece published on the website of the Financial Times. "Without it, I see no reliable way of breaking the sovereign-banking nexus." (see here: http://www.efxnews.com/story/20978/ecb-weidmann-time-end-preferential-treatment-gov-debt?utm_content=bufferffb97&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer)

Basically, removing automatic zero risk weighting on sovereign bonds, especially for the weaker peripheral sovereigns will be a major problem for the European banks and can precipitate a strong sell-off of the sovereign bonds. I suspect it will be unlikely to take place in the current environment. But gradual shift toward such an approach can easily take place.

Another recent article highlighted the shift away from foreign lending by European banks on foot of the growing sovereign debt exposures: http://www.voxeu.org/article/impact-sovereign-debt-exposure-bank-lending-evidence-european-debt-crisis

Based on Forbes data,

• BNP Paribas has total assets of USD2,668 billion, with USD43.1 billion in peripheral 'light' (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (1.62% of total assets);
• Deutsche Bank has total assets of USD2,545 billion, with USD16.2 billion in peripheral (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (0.64% of total assets);
• HSBC has total assets of USD2,468 billion, with USD6.7 billion in peripheral (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (0.27% of total assets);
• Barclays has total assets of USD2,328 billion, with USD29.2 billion in peripheral 'light' (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (1.26% of total assets);
• RBS has total assets of USD2,266 billion, with USD3.5 billion in peripheral (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (0.15% of total assets);
• Credit Agricole has total assets of USD2,131 billion, with USD19.1 billion in peripheral (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (0.89% of total assets);
• Banco Santander has total assets of USD1,610 billion, with USD69.6 billion in peripheral (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (4.32% of total assets);
• Lloyds has total assets of USD1,546 billion, with USD0.1 billion in peripheral (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (0.01% of total assets);
• Societe Generale has total assets of USD1,512 billion, with USD9.7 billion in peripheral (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (0.64% of total assets);
• Unicredit has total assets of USD1,232 billion, with USD54.3 billion in peripheral (ex-Cyprus) Government bonds (4.41% of total assets)

Two charts highlighting the plight of Spanish and Italian banks in terms of their sovereign bonds exposures (first) and the levels of LTROs exposures:

8/6/2013: Shortages of Safe Assets & Banks Recaps - troubled waters of Basel III

Here's an interesting view on European banks: http://www.voxeu.org/article/urgent-need-recapitalise-europe-s-banks . The core point is here:

Chart: Market-to-book value of European banks:

Quote: " On average, the market-to-book value of European banks now is about 0.50 (see Figure 1). This indicates that accountants’ estimates of bank capital are far too rosy, and that banks have substantial hidden losses on their books."

But there's more. "Until now, Europe’s banking sector has been kept afloat by implicit state guarantees of virtually all liabilities. …in 2012 these guarantees provided banks in Europe with an annual average funding advantage amounting to 0.3% of total assets. …An annual funding advantage of 0.3% of assets can be capitalised to be equivalent to 2% of total assets, on the assumption of a discount rate of 15% commensurate with banks’ uncertain earnings prospects. Given total banking assets of €33 trillion in the Eurozone, we are talking about an implicit guarantee of about €650 billion."

In short, through the crisis, European banking system was pumped with implicit supports to the tune of EUR2.6 trillion.

More than that. EBA is delaying stress tests into 2014, so we won't even in theory be able to know what is going on in the banks. Except, one has to doubt that the theory is a good instrument for the reality, as EBA has managed to bungle all stress tests it carried out to-date. In other words, EBA is acting de facto to increase implied supports as it delays and evades recognition of losses.


Look at the following paper: http://www.cpb.nl/en/publication/private-value-too-big-fail-guarantees (alternative link via ssrn: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2271326) which concluded that: "over the period 1-1-2008 until 15-6-2012" for only 151 European banks, "the size of the funding advantage' granted by various state supports "is large and fluctuates substantially over time. For most countries it rises from 0.1% of GDP in the first half of 2008 to more than 1% of GDP mid 2011. Our results are comparable to findings in previous studies. We find that larger banks enjoy on average higher rating uplifts, but the effect of size does not increase anymore for banks with total assets above 1,000 billion Euro compared to banks with assets between 250 and 1,000 billion Euro. In addition, a higher sovereign rating of a bank‟s home country leads on average to a higher rating uplift for that bank."

In other words, remove the protectionist supports and the system will crumble.

Note, the paper also cites the case of Ireland. "When we take a closer look at the funding advantages of banks from Spain, Italy, and Portugal in Figure 7, we see that the advantages enjoyed by banks are relatively small in these countries. This can be explained by the smaller rating uplifts that the banks from these countries enjoy. The fact that rating uplifts are relatively small in these countries is likely to be related to lower sovereign creditworthiness. The banking sector in, for example, Spain is not necessarily smaller when compared to GDP than the banking sector in France and Germany. So this is unlikely to explain the results we find. In Ireland, funding advantages are relatively large compared to the other three countries. The funding advantage enjoyed by Irish banks is somewhat higher than the advantage enjoyed by French and German banks."

Figure 7: funding advantage per country (Spain, Ireland*, Italy, and Portugal) (*note that the figure for Ireland is drawn on a different scale)

Now, when you just thought that the resolution path (as suggested by the article linked above) is well-known: assess, expose, recap, things are getting slightly out of hand. BIS has warned that simply pumping more capital into banks might be a wrong thing to do. Here's the BIS paper: http://www.bis.org/publ/cgfs49.pdf.

In the nutshell, BIS is saying that core tools for dealing with banks insolvency so far are… possibly… making these banks less safe, not more. The problem is that under Basel III, safety of bank capital is determined by safety of underlying assets held as capital (so far - fine). These 'safe' assets are… err… Government bonds and Government-guaranteed commercial paper (e.g. MBS). The idea is that 1) these assets are more secure, thus provide better cushion in the case of distress, and 2) these assets can be sold (are liquid) easily to cover any losses.

Problem is: there is a shortage of 'safe' assets as defined by Basel. The shortages are riven by 1) higher demand for these assets, 2) smaller number of 'safe' (highly-rated) sovereigns, 3) reduced issuance by highly-rated sovereigns ('austerity') and 4) central banks and non-banking financial institutions (e.g pensions funds) hoovering up these assets. BIS is not worried about the shortages of safe assets, but here are some links on this:

• from the Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/02/safe-asset-shortage
• and from BIS own researchers: http://www.bis.org/events/conf120621/gourinchas_paper.pdf
• from Bruegel: http://www.bruegel.org/nc/blog/detail/article/1023-blogs-review-the-safe-asset-shortage/
• from FT Alphaville: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/tag/shortage-of-safe-assets/ with a chart:

In turn, shortages of safe assets, even if nascent, can drive ups emend for riskier assets and thus increase riskier assets allocations by the financial intermediaries (think insurance and pensions funds on drugs).

Here's a very interesting discussion of what can happen next from @simonefoxman: http://qz.com/88585/new-fears-of-financial-interconnectedness-highlight-the-delusion-of-bank-capital/?oref=dbamerica

"And therein lies the risk. The assets don’t change hands permanently: It’s just one institution lending junk bonds to another and borrowing higher-quality ones in return. So a default on one side could translate into problems for the other. In such cases, the “high-quality capital” is only as reliable as the low-quality capital it was exchanged for. Moreover, if assets on either end of such a deal are mispriced, it could have knock-on effects across the financial system.

As a result, warns the BIS, the financial system is becoming more interconnected—and thus more susceptible to system-wide problems of the kind we saw in the financial crisis a few years ago."

Once again, Basel III might be off the target by a mile when it comes to improving quality of risk buffers in the banks… Just as with liquidity buffers: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/05/352013-basel-25-can-lead-to-increased.html

3/5/2013: Basel 2.5 can lead to increased liquidity & contagion risks

Banca d'Italia research paper No. 159, "Basel 2.5: potential benefits and unintended consequences" (April 2013) by Giovanni Pepe looks at the Basel III framework from the risk-weighting perspective. Under previous Basel rules, since 1996, "…the Basel risk-weighting regime has been based on the distinction between the trading and the
banking book. For a long time credit items have been weighted less strictly if held in the trading book, on the assumption that they are easy to hedge or sell."

Alas, the assumption of lower liquidity risks associated with assets held on trading book proved to be rather faulty. "The Great Financial Crisis made evident that banks declared a trading intent on positions that proved difficult or impossible to sell quickly. The Basel 2.5 package was developed in 2009 to better align trading and banking books’ capital treatments." Yet, the question remains as to whether the Basel 2.5 response is adequate to properly realign risk pricing for liquidity risk, relating to assets held on trading book.

"Working on a number of hypothetical portfolios [the study shows] that the new rules fell short of reaching their target and instead merely reversed the incentives. A model bank can now achieve a material capital saving by allocating its credit securities to the banking book [as opposed to the trading book], irrespective of its real intention or capability of holding them until maturity. The advantage of doing so is particularly pronounced when the incremental investment increases the concentration profile of the trading book, as usually happens for exposures towards banks’ home government. Moreover, in these cases trading book requirements are exposed to powerful cliff-edge
effects triggered by rating changes."

In the nutshell, Basel 2.5 fails to get the poor quality assets risks properly priced and instead created incentives for the banks to shift such assets to the different section of the balance sheet. The impact of this is to superficially inflate values of sovereign debt (by reducing risk-weighted capital requirements on these assets). Added effect of this is that Basel 2.5 inadvertently increases the risk of sovereign-bank-sovereign contagion cycle.

The paper is available at: http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/econo/quest_ecofin_2/qef159/QEF_159.pdf