July 10-24

During this holiday period, comments on entries may be slow to appear on the blog. So, please be patient!

European democracies and decision-making in times of crisis

Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi addresses this topic in this speech.

Five Go Mad on Fiscal Rules.

We have a new fiscal council. Congratulations to the five appointees, they’ve got a lot of work to do. Which of course begs the question–what should they be doing?

Rostowski: Lower interest rates as a reward for programme compliance

Jarek Rostowski is finance minister of Poland. Writing in the FT, he argues that a record of compliance with the agreed EU/IMF programme should lead to a dramatic decline in the interest rate, with the near-complete elimination of the margin over the cost of funds. The article is here.

New Projections of Interest Rates on EU Loans

The topic of the interest rate on Ireland’s EU loans has attracted a lot of attention. Unfortunately, however, hard information on the loans and comparisons with the loans being offered to Portugal is not always easy to come by. The purpose of this post is to provide the information that is publicly available on this issue and to present new calculations of the likely interest rates on Ireland’s loans.

The most common media reference point for the cost of Ireland’s loans is this information note released by the NTMA in November. That document projected the cost of Ireland’s loans from the European Financial Stability Mechanism (EFSM) at 5.7 percent and the cost of Ireland’s loans from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) at 6.05 percent.

With €22.5 billion being provided to Ireland by the EFSM, €17.7 billion by the EFSF and €4.8 billion coming from bilateral loans, the NTMA note assumed the interest rate on the bilateral loans would be the same as the EFSF rate. Thus, the estimated average cost of the EU loans was 5.875 percent. (I am leaving aside in this note the question of the cost of funding from the IMF, which is determined according to standard, if somewhat complex, IMF procedures.)

In a briefing note for the Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs, I noted that market interest rates had risen since the November briefing and the pricing of the first EFSM bond had not gone as well as anticipated. Based on those considerations, I suggested that the cost of EFSM funding was likely to be 6.09 percent while the cost of EFSF loans would be 6.44 percent.

The period since that briefing note was written has seen a number of EFSF and EFSM bonds issued to Ireland and Portugal, so now seems like a good time to attempt to get a more accurate picture.

Here’s a link to a spreadsheet that describes each of the bonds issued by EFSF and EFSM as well as the conditions on which they were disbursed to Ireland and Portugal. I have made estimates of what the interest rates will be on funds that are not yet drawn down by assessing their likely average maturity (to match the planned 7.5 year average maturity for Ireland and Portugal), calculating current market interest rates for those maturities (based on the mid-swaps benchmark used by the EFSF and EFSM) and then adding in the estimated margins.

A quick summary:

1. The average interest rate on EFSM loans for Ireland is projected to be 6.13 percent.

2. For Portugal, the EFSM loans project to have an average interest rate of 5.34 percent. The lower rate than for Ireland is because the EFSM’s profit margin on Portuguese loans is 77 basis points lower than for Ireland.

3. The average cost of EFSF loans for Ireland is projected to be 6.29 percent. This is lower than I had estimated in January because I had used the assumption underlying the NTMA’s November document that the margin over funding cost that would determine the effective borrowing cost for Ireland would be 317 basis points. Based on the one EFSF bond issue for Ireland so far, I now estimate that this average margin will be 305 basis points.

4. The average cost of EFSF loans for Portugal is projected to be 5.76 percent.

5. Based on the assumption that Ireland’s bilateral loans (not yet drawn down) will carry the same average interest rate as the EFSF, the average interest rate on Ireland’s EU loans will be 6.21 percent, 33.5 basis points higher than estimated last November. The average interest rate on Portugal’s EU loans is projected to be 5.55 percent, 66 basis points lower than the projected rate for Ireland. 

6. The current terms on Greece’s EU-IMF loans have been widely reported to be 4.2 percent for a 7.5 year average maturity after Greece was granted a 100 basis point reduction at the March 11 meeting of the Heads of Government of the Euro Area member states.

For those interested, here’s a rough description of how the calculations were done.