The present generation of European leaders will doubtless be remembered for many things, but somewhere high up there on the list will be the appauling sense of bad-timing they seem to have when making critical announcements. The confusion caused by certain ill-considered remarks from Angela Merkel about how private sectors bondholders would need to participate in future EU bailout processes is evidently one good example. Another, without doubt is going to be the decision by EU Commissioner Olli Rehn to appear before the world’s press today (yes, today of all days, one day after the sensitive announcement of the Irish Bank Bail-out plan and the decision to create the European Financial Mechanism), and inform the assembled throngs that as far as the EU Commission could see Spain will not be sticking to its 6% of GDP fiscal deficit committment next year, simply because according to EU calculations the deficit is going to be 6.4% – unless, of course – there is another round of fiscal reduction measures. Continue reading →

“There is a difficulty that is widely recognized that the amount [of debt] to be repaid is high in 2014 and 2015,” Giorgios Papaconstantinou (the Greek Finance Minister).

“We are confident that Greece will be able to return to the markets. But whether it will be able to return to the markets on a scale that allows Greece to pay off its European partners and the IMF, that is a question.”…”We have a number of options. If paying off the €110 billion loan proves to be a question, we stand ready to exercise some of those options” – Poul Thomsen, head of the IMF team in the ECB-EU-IMF troika delegation.

“In the rushed last-minute deal to forestall certain bankruptcy, everyone missed one very important fact. That the memorandum created an unrealistic and immense borrowing squeeze on the feckless Greek state for the next five years.”
Nick Skrekas – Refusing Greek Loan Extensions Defies Financial Reality, Wall Street Journal

Get On The Right Track Baby!

According to the latest IMF-EU report Greece’s reform programme remians “broadly on track” even if the international lenders do acknowledge that this years fiscal deficit target will now not be met and that a fresh round of structural measures is needed if the country is to generate a sustained recovery. My difficulty here must be with my understanding of the English lexemes “remains” and “sustainable”, since for something to remain on track it should have been running along it previously (rather than never having gotten on it), and for something – in this case a recovery – to be sustained, it first needs to get started, and with an economy looking set to contract by nearly 4% this year, and the IMF forecasting a further shrinkage of 2.6% next year, many Greeks could be forgiven for thinking that talk of recovery at this point is, at the very least, premature. A more useful question might be “what kind of medicine is this that we are being given”, and “what are the realistic chances that it actually works”. Unfortunately, in the weird and wonderful world of Macro Economics, witch doctors are not in short supply. Continue reading →

Spain’s Tinsa Price Index was out last week, and showed Spanish property prices fell again in September, and at an accelerating rate. As Tinsa point out in their report, both “Metropolitan Areas and municipalities on the Mediterranean Coast,” whose rates experienced a significant drop from the previous month, have contributed decisively to this steep decline”.

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Just to follow up on my recent long Estonia post, a couple of new data points have caught my attention recently: the sharp rise in Estonian inflation and the ongoing goods trade deficit. Continue reading →

Last Thursday Moody’s Investor Service cut Spain’s Sovereign credit – to Aa1 from AAA – thus removing the last of the country’s highly-valued triple-A ratings. The move really surprised no one – in this case the Moody’s rating could be regarded as a lagging indicator on the health of Spain’s finances – since the two other “majors” (S&Ps and Fitch) had long taken the decision, and the market predictably shrugged off the news, as if to say “what else is new”. But there was one small detail in the report which should have attracted more attention than it has: the agency explicitly stressed that it was the government’s show of determination to reduce its very large fiscal deficit in the near term which influenced their decision to limit the downgrade to just one rating notch, and this was also the reason the rating had been assigned, for the time being, a stable outlook. Which means, of course, that should there be any slippage in that determination, any wearying, or falling asleep at the wheel, then the outlook would rapidly move to negative, and more downgrades could be anticipated. Continue reading →

According to an intriguing article I read in Bloomberg recently an alert signal has been sounded due to the fact that house prices in the Scandinavian countries have been rising very rapidly of late. Judging by what they explain what is now going on in the housing markets of Norway, Sweden and Finland would seem to have all the hallmarks of a “mini-bubble”, one which is all the more perplexing given the lowish level of economic activity which characterises the current environment. But then I asked myself, and those whopping German export numbers we saw in the second quarter, wheren’t they also some kind of “mini bubble” which was quite out of keeping with what we should expect to be seeing.

Worse, if this seeming Scaninavian bubble were to pop, it could well send what has up to now been among the strongest regional rebounds on the whole European continent straight into a nosedive. In particular the Finnish problem interests me, house prices are rising steadily, and with them construction activity, even as the economy in general remains severely depressed following one of the sharpest output falls to be found in the Eurozone. Continue reading →