30/7/18: Egg Misses the Face at the Atlantic Council: Dodgy Banks, Dodgy Reports

Buzzfeed report throws unwanted light onto the tight rope walking at the Atlantic Council, where some august fellows are earning cash on the sidelines of private sector clients with questionable reputation:

A Report On Money Laundering At Latvian Banks Raises Questions About Conflict Of Interest At The Atlantic Council

Buzzfeed link here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ingaspringe/report-on-money-laundering-at-latvian-banks-raises.

Buried at the end of the report is this quote from Damon Wilson, the council’s executive vice president: "Every Latvian politician has worked with and knows us..." Which does lift the proverbial rug just a notch over the proverbial pile of history compiled underneath the Council: the organization has been a de facto go-to shop for framing politics of Eastern Europe. The real scandal, of course, is right there. Just imagine the screams from the media if a private initiative, say called Cambridge Analytica, uttered a similar statement in public? And yet, the AC can make such a statement in defence of its activities. Smell the salts?

30/7/18: Impact of Terrorist Events on European Equity Markets

Our recent paper on the impact of terrorist events on equity markets valuations in Europe has been published in the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance (November 2017): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10629769

30/7/18: Annotated History of the U.S. Treasury Yield Curve

Courtesy of the forgotten source (apologies) a neat summary chart plotting the timeline of the 10 year U.S. Treasury yield:

For referencing purposes… 

30/7/18: Corruption Perceptions: Tax Havens vs U.S. and Ireland

Transparency International recently released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, a measure of the degree of public concerns with corruption, covering 180 countries. 

The Index is quite revealing. Not a single large economy is represented in the top 10 countries in terms of low perceptions of corruption. Worse, for a whole range of the much ‘talked about’ tax havens and tax optimising states, corruption seems to be not a problem. Switzerland ranks 3rd in the world in public perceptions of corruption, Luxembourg ranks 8th, along with the Netherlands, and the world’s leading ‘financial secrecy’ jurisdictions, the UK. Hong Kong is ranked 13th. Ireland is in a relatively poor spot at 19th place. 

American exceptionalism, meanwhile, continues to shine. The U.S. occupies a mediocre (for its anti-corruption rhetoric and the chest-thumping pursuits of corrupt regimes around the world) 16th place in the Corruption Perception Index, just one place above Ireland, and in the same place as Belgium and Austria (the former being a well-known centre for business corruption, while the latter sports highly secretive and creative, when it comes to attracting foreign cash, financial system). UAE (21st), Uruguay (23rd), Barbados (25th), Bhutan (26th) and more, are within the statistical confidence interval of the U.S. score. 

And consider Europe. While most of the Nordic and ‘Germanic’ Europe, plus the UK and Ireland, are  in top 20, the rest of the EU rank below the U.S. All non-EU Western European countries, meanwhile, are in the top 15. 

Now, in terms of dynamics, using TI’s data that traces comparable indices back to 2012:

- The U.S. performance in terms of corruption remains effectively poor. The country scored 73 on CPI in 2012-2013, and since then, the score roughy remained bounded between 74 and 75. Ireland, however, managed to improve significantly, relative to the past. In 2012, Irish CPI score was 69. Since then, it rose to a peak of 75 in 2015 and is currently standing at 74. So in terms of both 2012 to peak, and peak to 2017 dynamics, Ireland is doing reasonably well, even though we are still suffering from the low starting base. 

Hey, anyone heard of any corruption convictions at the Four Courts recently?

30/7/18: Burden Sharing, Reforms and Greece

Much has been said in recent years about European reforms, recovery, burden-sharing and Greece. Most of it draws links of causality along the following lines:

• Greek crisis has been resolved on the basis of the country adoption of European and IMF-structured reforms, and no burden-sharing is needed to make things right;
• European recovery has been organically linked to European reforms, which include future burden-sharing mechanism; and
• No burden-sharing mechanism has been deployed during the European recovery period anywhere.

In other words, both, Greece and Europe at large are enjoying an ongoing recovery that has been underpinned by reforms, not by burden-sharing arrangements of any sort.

And yet, contrasting experts reports, Greece continues to provide evidence to the contrary:

1. European recovery has been asymmetric to the Greek situation, where lack of tangible recovery is keeping the country constantly on the edge of slipping back into 'assisted living' via official external lenders;
2. The above happened despite the fact that Greece has adopted more 'reforms' than any other European economy; and
3. The above has happened during the extended period of asymmetric and massive-scale burden-sharing carried out by the ECB via its QE (Greece received no QE benefits, while the rest of the Euro area enjoys huge fiscal support subsidies from Frankfurt).

How do we know this? Why, look at the latest fiasco with Greek bonds (not covered by ECB's QE) in contrast with Italian bonds (covered by QE):

So, about the effectiveness of those reforms,  and no-burden-sharing, then...

16/7/18: Wither Free Market America

Prior to the 1990's, “U.S. markets were more competitive than European markets”, with the U.S. having a lead-start on the EU of some decades, if not centuries, when it comes to the anti-trust laws and anti-true enforcement. In fact, as noted by Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon in their new paper “HOW EU MARKETS BECAME MORE COMPETITIVE THAN US MARKETS: A STUDY OF INSTITUTIONAL DRIFT” (NBER Working Paper 24700 http://www.nber.org/papers/w24700 June 2018), it was Europe that largely copied the U.S.  legal and regulatory frameworks for dealing with excessive concentration of the market power. Thus, given the “initial conditions, one would have predicted that U.S. markets would remain more competitive than European (EU) markets.” Except they did not. As Gutiérrez and Philippon show, the U.S. “experienced a continuous rise in concentration and profit margins starting in the late 1990s. And, perhaps more surprisingly, EU markets did not experience these trends so that, today, they appear more competitive than their American counter-parts.”

“Figure 1 illustrates these facts by showing that profit rates and concentration measures have increased in the US yet remained stable in Europe. In addition, note that the U.S the increased integration among EU economies essentially shifts the appropriate measure of concentration from the red dotted line towards the blue line with triangles – which further strengthens the trend."

Figure 1: Profit Rates and Concentration Ratios: US vs. EU

Source:  Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018)

So, in summary, today, “European markets have lower concentration, lower excess profits, and lower regulatory barriers to entry.” even looking at specific industries “with significant increases in concentration in the U.S., such as Telecom and Airlines, and show that these same industries have not experienced similar evolutions in Europe, even though they use the same technology and are exposed to the same foreign competition” (see chart below).

Source:  Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018)

Of course, the point of reduced degree of competition in the U.S. markets is hardly new. I wrote about this on numerous occasions, including covering evidence on the U.S. markets monopolization, oligopolization and markets concentration risks (see links here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2018/05/24518-america-medici-cycle-and.html) and I wrote about these phenomena in the context of the growing trend toward de-democratization of the U.S. politics (see: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3033949).  Hence, the main issue with this evidence is: “what explains the U.S. trend in contrast to the EU?”

Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018) argue that politicians care about consumer welfare but also enjoy retaining control over industrial policy. We show that politicians from different countries who set up a common regulator will make it more independent and more pro-competition than the national ones it replaces.” In other words, once politicians surrender control to a multinational institution (e.g. the EU or ‘Brussels’ or, in the case of Switzerland, to the umbrella-type Federal Government), they tend to favour such new institutional arrangement to be more independent from national politics.

Hence, as Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018) more, “European institutions are more independent than their American counterparts, and they enforce pro-competition policies more strongly than any individual country ever did. Countries with ex-ante weak institutions benefit more from the delegation of antitrust enforcement to the EU level. “ These dynamics are reflected in the switch from the ’average of the nation states’ red dotted line in the chart above, toward a unified EU-wide measure reflected by the blue line.

This theoretical view produces three treatable hypotheses: if Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018) are correct, then:
1. EU countries agree to set up an anti-trust regulator that is tougher and more independent than their old national regulators (and the US)
2. US firms spend more on lobbying US politicians and regulators than EU firms.
3. Countries with weaker ex-ante institutions benefit more from supra-national regulation.

For Hypothesis 1, the authors look at merger and non-merger reviews and remedies that form “an EU-level competency”. Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018) “show that DG Comp is more independent and more pro-competition than any of the national regulators, including the U.S.” Furthermore, “enforcement has remained stable (or even tightened) in Europe while it has become laxer in the U.S.” More ominously (for the consumption-based economy like the U.S.), product market regulations, usually a shared competency between the member state and the EU, the authors “find that the EU has become relatively more pro-competition than the U.S. over the past 15 years. Product market regulations have decreased in Europe, while they have remained stable or increased in the U.S.”

For Hypothesis 2: Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018) look at political expenditures, and show that “U.S. firms spend substantially more on lobbying and campaign contributions, and are far more likely to succeed than European firms/lobbyists.”

For Hypothesis 3: Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018) show that “EU countries with initially weak institutions have experienced large improvements in antitrust and product market regulation. Moreover, we find that the relative improvement is larger for EU countries than for non-EU countries with similar initial institutions.”

There is, of course, a remaining issue left unaddressed by the three hypotheses above: does more enforcement by more independent regulators inhibit innovation and competition? In other words, is European advantage over the U.S. a de facto Trojan Horse by which inhibiting regulation enters the markets? Gutiérrez and Philippon (2018) “find no evidence of excessive enforcement in Europe: enforcement leads to lower concentration and profits but we find no evidence of a negative impact on innovation. If anything, (relative) enforcement is associated with faster future (relative) productivity growth, although the effects are small.”

So, put simply, part of the increasing market concentration and power in the U.S. can be explained by the tangible politicization of the American regulatory environment. Of course, as noted in my own posts on the subject (see link above), this political channel for monopolization reinforces industry structure channel (ICT ‘disruption’ channel) and other channels that support increased market power for dominant firms. All of this, taken together, means one thing: the U.S. is falling dangerously behind in terms of the degree of its economy openness to challengers to the dominant firms, resulting in barriers to entrepreneurs, innovators and smaller enterprises. The costs of this ‘Google Syndrome’ are mounting, ranging from depressed wages, to jobs insecurity, to lack of investment and productivity growth, to growing voters unease with the status quo.

The premise of the Free Markets America no longer holds. Worse, Social(list) Europe is now beating the U.S. in its own game.

14/7/18: Elephants. China Shop, Enters a Mouse: Global Debt Bubble

Bank for International Settlements Annual Report for 2018 has a very interesting set of charts covering the growing global debt bubble, one of the key risks to the global economy highlighted in the report.

First, levels:

• Global debt rose from 179% of GDP at the end of 2007 to 217% at the end of 2017 - adding 38 percentage points to the overall leverage carried by the global economy.
• The rise has been more dramatic for the Emerging Economies, with debt levels rising from 113% of GDP to 176% between the end of 2007 and the end of 2017, a net addition of 63 percentage points.
• Advanced economies faired somewhat better, posting an increase from 233% of GDP to 269%, a net rise of 36 percentage points.
• As it stood at the end of 2017, Global Debt was well in excess of x3 the Global GDP - a degree of leverage not seen in the modern history.

As noted by BIS: “...financial markets are overstretched, as noted above, and we have seen a continuous rise in the global stock of debt, private plus public, in relation to GDP. This has extended a trend that goes back to well before the crisis and that has coincided with a long-term decline in interest rates".

Next, impacts of monetary policy normalization:

As the Central Banks embark on gradual, well-flagged in advance and 'orderly' overall rates and asset purchases 'normalization', the global economy is likely to bifurcate, based on individual countries debt exposures. As the chart above shows, impact from a modest, 100bps hike in rates, will be relatively significant for all economies, with greater impact on highly indebted countries.

Per BIS: "Since the mid-1980s, unsustainable economic expansions appear to have manifested themselves mainly in the shape of unsustainable increases in debt and asset prices. Thus, even in the absence of any near-term market disruptions, keeping interest rates too low for too long could raise financial and macroeconomic risks further down the road. In particular, there are reasons to believe that the downward trend in real rates and the upward trend in debt over the past two decades are related and even mutually reinforcing. True, lower equilibrium interest rates may have increased the sustainable level of debt. But, by reducing the cost of credit, they also actively encourage debt accumulation. In turn, high debt levels make it harder to raise interest rates, as asset markets and the economy become more interest rate-sensitive – a kind of “debt trap”."

Thus, the impetus for rates and monetary policies normalisation is the threat of continued debt bubble inflation, but the cost of such normalisation is the deflation of the debt bubble already present. In other words, there's an elephant and here's the china shop.

"A further complication in calibrating normalisation relates to the need to build policy buffers for the next downturn. Indeed, the room for policy manoeuvre is much narrower than it was before the crisis: policy rates are substantially lower and balance sheets much larger". And here's the mouse: cyclically, we are nearing the turning point in the current expansion. And despite all the PR releases about the 'robust recovery' current up-cycle in the global economy has been associated with lower growth rates, lower productivity growth, lower real investment (as opposed to financial flows), and more debt than equity (see http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2018/07/14718-second-longest-recovery.html).

In other words, things are risky, but also fragile. Elephants in a china shop. Enters a mouse...

14/7/18: The Second Longest Recovery

One chart never ceased to amaze me - the one that shows just how unimpressive the current 'second longest in modern history' recovery (and only 9 months shy of it being the 'first longest') has been, and just how sticky the adverse shocks impacts can be in modern crises that can be best described by the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) environment:

The fact that the current recovery cycle has been weak is only one part of the story, however, that would be less worrying if not for the second part. Namely, that almost every successive recovery cycle in the past three decades has been weaker than the previous one.

Here is a handy summary of the recovery cycles in the last four recessions based on annual data, for real GDP and real GDP PPP-adjusted:

12/7/18: Technology, Government Policies & Supply-Side Secular Stagnation

I have posted about the new World Bank report on Romania's uneven convergence experience in the previous post (here). One interesting chart in the report shows comparatives in labour productivity growth across a range of the Central European economies since the Global Financial Crisis.

The chart is striking! All economies, save Poland - the 'dynamic Tigers of CEE' prior to the crisis - have posted marked declines in labour productivity growth, as did the EU28 as a whole. When one recognises the fact 2008-2016 period includes dramatic losses in employment, rise in unemployment and exits from the labour force during the period of the GFC, and the subsequent Euro Area Sovereign Debt Crisis - all of which have supported labour productivity to the upside - the losses in productivity growth would be even more pronounced.

This, of course, dovetails naturally with the twin secular stagnations thesis I have been writing about in these pages before. In particular, this data supports the supply-side secular stagnation thesis, especially the technological re-balancing proposition that implies that since the late 2000s, technological innovation has shifted toward increasingly substituting sources of economic value added away from labour and in favour of software/robotics/ICT forms of capital:

Human capital is the only offsetting factor for this trend of displacement. And it is lagging in the CEE:

But the problem is worse than simple tertiary education figures suggest. Current trends in technological innovation stress data intensity, AI and full autonomy of technological systems from labour and human capital. Which implies that even educated and skilled workforce is no longer a buffer to displacement.

As the result, in countries like Romania, with huge slack in human capital and skills, investment is not flowing to education, training, entrepreneurship and other sources of human capital uplift:

While barriers to entrepreneurship remain, if not rising:

In effect, technological innovation in its current form is potentially driving down not only productivity growth, but also labour force participation. The result, as in the economies of the West:

1. Notional large scale decline in official unemployment (officially unemployed numbers are down)
2. Significant lags in recovery in labour force participation (hidden unemployed, permanently discouraged etc numbers are up)
3. The two factors somewhat offset each other in terms of superficially boosting productivity growth (with real productivity actually probably even lower than the official figures suggest)

These three factors contribute to an expanding army of voters who are marginalised within the system.

Romania is a canary in the European secular stagnation mine. 

12/7/18: Romania's Uneven convergence Path: 2007-2018

A new World Bank report, led by Donato De Rosa, covers Romania's reforms and economic development experience. Worth a read! |
"From Uneven Growth to Inclusive Development : Romania's Path to Shared Prosperity" https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29864.

Quick summary:

• "Romania’s transformation has been a tale of two Romanias: one urban, dynamic, and integrated with the EU; the other rural, poor, and isolated."
• "Reforms spurred by EU accession boosted productivity ...GDP per capita rose from 30 percent of the EU average in 1995 to 59 percent in 2016."
• "Today, more than 70 percent of the country’s exports go to the EU, and their technological complexity is increasing rapidly... the gross value added of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector in GDP, at 5.9 percent in 2016, is among the highest in the EU."
• "Yet Romania remains the country in the Union with by far the largest share of poor people, when measured by the $5.50 per day poverty line (2011 purchasing power parity)".  More than 26% of country population lives below that poverty line, "more than double the rate of Bulgaria (12%)."

• "While Bucharest has already exceeded the EU average income per capita and many secondary cities are becoming hubs of prosperity and innovation, Romania remains one of the least urbanized countries in the EU, with only 55 percent of people living in cities."
• "Overall, access to public services remains constrained for many citizens, particularly in rural areas, and there is a large infrastructure gap, which is a drag on the international competitiveness of the more dynamic Romania and limits economic opportunities for the other Romania in lagging and rural areas."

The positive effects of Accession were frontloaded, when it comes to structural reforms:

• "Romania was invited to open negotiations with the EU in December 1999.  Until Romania joined in January 2007, EU accession remained an anchor for reforms, providing momentum for the privatization and restructuring of SOEs and for regulatory and judiciary reforms."
• "Output gradually recovered, and until 2008 the country enjoyed high but volatile growth... Unemployment was on a declining trend, but youth and long-term unemployment remained elevated. Skills and labor shortages became increasingly widespread. High inactivity persisted stubbornly, particularly among women. Gains in labor force participation were modest overall. ...Inequality increased further, as large categories of people—the Roma in particular—continued to be excluded from the benefits of growth."
• "Although output has recovered since 2008, institutional shortcomings have compounded the effects of the crisis, contributing to significant setbacks in poverty reduction, and are again leading to macroeconomic imbalances."
• "Fiscal consolidation during 2009–2015 has helped place economic growth on a strong footing. However, lack of commitment and underfunding for the delivery of public services and poor targeting of social programs have contributed to the negative income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution (the so-called bottom 40) in 2009–2015, with poverty remaining above pre-crisis levels, and inequality still among the highest in the EU."

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.

6/7/18: Central Bank of Russia Injects Capital in Three Lenders, Continues Sector Restrcturing

Reuters reported (https://www.reuters.com/article/russia-banks/russian-c-bank-says-to-deposit-2-8-bln-at-otkritie-trust-and-rost-idUSR4N1TT00E) on Central Bank of Russia (CBR) setting up a 'bad bank' to resolve non-performing assets in three medium- large-sized banks that CBR controls. In 2016, the CBR took over control over three medium- large-sized banks, Otkritie, B&N Bank and Promsvyazbank. Last month, the CBR announced an injection of RB 42.7 billion of funds to recapitalise Otkritie with funds earmarked to cover losses in Otkritie's pension fund.  Most Bank received RB37.1 billion in new capital. The CBR also deposited RB 174.2 billion (USD2.78 billion) in three banks (RB63.3 billion of which went to Otkritie) on a 3-5 years termed deposit basis.

The funds will be used to reorganise banks operations and shift non-performing and high risk assets to a Trust Bank-based 'bad bank' which will operate as an asset management company.

After divesting bad loans, Otkritie is expected to be sold back to private investors.

CBR's total exposure to troubled banks is now at RB 227 billion (USD3.5 billion), with CBR having spent RB 760 billion (USD 12 billion) on its overall campaign to recapitalise troubled lenders. CBR holds RB 1.3 trillion (USD30 billion) on deposit with lenders it controls.

As BOFIT note: "...the CBR to date has used over 45 billion USD (about 3% of 2017 GDP) in supporting the three banks that it took over last year. Some of this amount, however, should be recovered when assets in banks acquired by the CBR are sold off as well as in the planned privatisations of the banks." At the beginning of June, Otkritie stated that the bank aims to float a 15-20% stake in 2021. The bank said t's target for pricing will be "at least 1.3 times the capital the bank has at the end of 2020". Otkritie targets return on equity of 18% in 2020, and so far, in the first five months of 2018, the bank made RB 5.4 billion in net profit, per CBR.

Otkritie ranked sixth largest bank in Central and Eastern Europe by capitalisation by The Banker in 2017 prior to nationalisation. Following nationalisation, Otkritie ranked 16th in CEE, having lost some USD2.4 billion in capital.

Another lender, Sovetsky bank from Saint Petersburg lost its license on July 3. The bank gas been in trouble since February 2012 when the CBR approved its first plans for restructuring. In February 2018, the bank was in a "temporary administration" through the Banking Sector Consolidation Fund. The latest rumours suggest that Sovetsky deposits and loans assets will retransferred to another lender.  Sovetsky was under original administration by another lender, Tatfondbank, from March 2016, until Tatfondbank collapsed in March 2017 (official CBR statement https://www.cbr.ru/eng/press/PR/?file=03032017_105120eng2017-03-03T10_47_12.htm, and see this account of criminal activity at the Tatfondbank: https://en.crimerussia.com/financialcrimes/collapse-of-tatfondbank-robert-musin-siphoned-off-funds-from-state-owned-bank/ and https://en.crimerussia.com/financialcrimes/tatfondbank-officially-collapses/). Tatfondbank's tangible connection to Ireland's IFSC was covered here: https://realnoevremya.com/articles/1292-tatfondbank-raised-60-million-via-obscure-irish-company-just-before-collapse.

Overall, CBR have done as good a job of trying to clean up Russian banking sector mess, as feasible, with criminal proceedings underway against a range of former investors and executives. The cost of the CBR-led resolution and restructuring actions has been rather hefty, but the overall outrun has been some moderate strengthening of the sector, hampered by the tough trading conditions for Russian banking sector as a whole. A range of U.S. and European sanctions against Russian financial institutions and, more importantly, constant threat of more sanctions to come have led to higher funding costs, more acute risks profiles, lack of international assets diversification, and even payments problems, all of which reduce the banking sector ability to recover low quality and non-performing assets. The CBR has zero control over these factors.

Russia currently has 6 out of top 10 banks in CEE, according to The Banker rankings:

Source: http://www.thebanker.com/Banker-Data/Banker-Rankings/Top-1000-World-Banks-Russian-banks-mixed-fortunes-influence-CEE-ranking?ct=true.

These banks are systemic to the Russian economy, and only the U.S. sabre rattling is holding them back from being systemic in the broader CEE region. This is a shame, because opening up a banking channel to Russian economy greater integration into the global financial flows is a much more important bet on the future of democratisation and normalisation in Russia than any sanctions Washington can dream up.
 


As an aside, new developments in the now infamous Danske Bank case of laundering 'blood money' from Russia, relating to the Magnitzky case were reported this week in the EUObserver: https://euobserver.com/foreign/142286.