Author: Karl Whelan

Kilkenomics 2011

I’ve agreed to participate in some sessions at this year’s Kilkenomics which will take place between Wednesday November 2 and Sunday November 6.  While obviously leaving myself open to (perhaps fair!) jokes about the differences between economists and comedians, I’m looking forward to it. I’d recommend people to take a look at the line-up. There are lots of interesting sessions on important issues and many excellent speakers, including Jeff Sachs from Columbia.

Irish Times: “Overseas Deposits Increase Significantly”. Really?

The lead story in today’s Irish Times carries the headline “Overseas deposits at Irish banks increase significantly”. Well, here’s a chart showing non-resident deposits for the three definitions of the Irish banking sector published by the Central Bank: All Banks, Domestic Group (which excludes IFSC banks) and Covered Banks.

How many of you can see the series increasing significantly at the last data point, in the usual sense of the word, meaning a large increase? It appears the headline reflects the following wording provided by Dan O’Brien (who would not have written the headline): “The small but significant increase in deposits …” In other words, Dan is saying that overseas deposits didn’t rise significantly but the small uptick could potentially be a good sign for the future.

Beyond the headline (sub-editor screwups seem to be very common at newspapers) what’s odd about the story is that even though the latest data on overseas and resident deposits don’t show much more than a continuation of recent trends, the rest of the piece treats the release as though something interesting has happened, including the obligatory crowing from Minister Noonan:

The Central Bank statistics on deposits point to a stabilisation of the Irish financial system. Responding to the developments, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan said the “deposit figures illustrate growing national and international confidence in the Irish banking system. It is particularly impressive that the deposit position of the Irish banks has improved at a time of such global uncertainty.”

He described the cash inflows as an “an endorsement of the Government’s restructuring of the banking system. This restructuring has reduced the cost of the banks to the State and has also seen the banks beginning to access international money markets without the benefit of the State guarantee.”

For those interested in actually seeing what’s going on with deposits (yes I know the chart above is rubbish — I don’t know how other people get decent quality graphs up on this site!) here’s a Powerpoint presentation (also here in grimer PDF) with charts for total deposits, non-resident deposits, resident deposits, and private sector resident deposits. In addition to the Total/Domestic/Covered breakdown, I’ve provided charts for an IFSC/Domestic Non-Covered/Covered breakdown.

I surmise from these charts that the non-resident withdrawals have largely tailed off and that the trend for resident deposits in the covered banks remains a downward one.

ECB and State-Owned Banks, Again

There are a lot of reasons why attention has turned to the idea of leveraging EFSF via one of a number of possible methods. If this can be done, it takes a big step towards solving both the solvency and liquidity issues plaguing Euro area sovereigns and banks – on the liquidity front, a €2 trillion or €3 trillion fund is big enough to buy up Spanish and Italian bonds for a number of years, while €440 billion is big enough to absorb a lot of the potential losses.

The financial press are abuzz with various mechanisms that could be used to leverage up the EFSF. However, I was surprised today to twice read that Gros and Meyer’s proposal to have EFSF (or some vehicle funded by EFSF) register as a credit institution and borrow from ECB is likely to be illegal.

The Wall Street Journal reports

Klaus Regling, chief executive of the European Financial Stability Facility, told a podium discussion that “there are serious concerns” that such a scheme wouldn’t be allowed under the EU Treaty, which forbids the ECB from financing governments directly.

And at the FT’s Money Supply blog, Ralph Atkins writes

But Jens Weidmann, Germany’s Bundesbank president and ECB governing council member, has already made clear his opposition. Giving the EFSF access to ECB funding, Mr Weidmann argues, would be “monetary financing” – central bank funding of governments – which is banned under European Union treaties …

More crucially, an ECB legal opinion issued in March made clear that the European Stability Mechanism – a permanent fund expected to replace the temporary EFSF from 2013 – would not be allowed access to its liquidity because of the ban on monetary financing. “The ECB recalls that the monetary financing prohibition…is one of the basic pillars of the legal architecture of economic and monetary union,” its lawyers wrote then. I am not a lawyer, but to me that would also rule out giving the EFSF access.

The ECB legal opinion states

Article 123 TFEU would not allow the ESM to become a counterparty of the Eurosystem under Article 18 of the Statute of the ESCB. On this latter element, the ECB recalls that the monetary financing prohibition in Article 123 TFEU is one of the basic pillars of the legal architecture of EMU

Of course, we in Ireland have been here before. Back in 2009, a number of very serious people assured us that nationalising any banks would be inadvisable because the ECB was prohibited under the monetary financing clause from lending to nationalised banks. (That Anglo were at the time borrowing in a big way from the ECB didn’t seem to get in the way of what seemed like a great argument).

As I pointed out back then on a few occasions (e.g. here and here) this wasn’t true because while Article 123 of the current consolidated Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union states

1. Overdraft facilities or any other type of credit facility with the European Central Bank or with the central banks of the Member States (hereinafter referred to as ‘national central banks’) in favour of Union institutions, bodies, offices or agencies, central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of Member States shall be prohibited, as shall the purchase directly from them by the European Central Bank or national central banks of debt instruments.

This is immediately followed by

2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to publicly owned credit institutions which, in the context of the supply of reserves by central banks, shall be given the same treatment by national central banks and the European Central Bank as private credit institutions.

So while the ECB may recall the monetary financing prohibition, you could argue that they don’t recall it very well.  One could quibble that EFSF is not currently not a “publicly owned credit institution” but it’s hardly high octane financial engineering to create a vehicle funded by EFSF that counts as such.

Dan O’Brien on Burning Bondholders

Dan argues the ECB case for not burning Anglo bondholders in today’s Irish Times. I’ll quote the main argument at length

Apart from Ireland, nobody else in the euro zone has sought to make seniors take their losses so there are no cases to which one can point as evidence. But an immediate neighbour’s experience has been watched very closely. Denmark last year introduced the toughest bank resolution laws in Europe. These laws, which govern the winding-down of bust banks, are more similar to those in the United States than those across the rest of Europe. In the US, senior bank bondholders have traditionally got their just desserts if the institutions they invest in fail.

When two Danish banks failed earlier this year, their seniors were burned. This raised funding costs for the entire Danish banking system.

From the euro zone perspective, the ECB is obliged to consider that if a default precedent were to be set in the senior bond market, then at the very least funding costs for all banks in the zone would rise. The savings for Ireland of a few billion euro would be offset many times over by the generalised increase in funding costs for the already-teetering euro zone banking system.

That there is good reason – in the collective European interest – not to burn seniors does not lessen the injustice of having Irish citizens pay for European bankers’ losses (although the hugely subsidised bailout loan is a partial de facto spreading of the burden).

The point that burning senior bondholders may raise the cost of funding for banks is a fair one. But the relatively lower cost of bank funding obtained from a policy of supporting all senior bondholders is hardly a free lunch. The additional risk that the market would perceive as being attached to bank bondholders would have been transferred away from sovereigns.

Now one could argue that some sovereigns in the Euro area are in a position to take on this kind of risk in order to protect their banking systems. But others clearly are not.

My position on this is that there is no need for the question of burning senior bondholders to be a simple black or white proposition. As I discussed in this paper, the EU could adopt a policy that sees senior bondholders only incur haircuts if equity and subordinated bonds have been wiped out, the bank has been nationalised, and the state has incurred costs of x% of GDP to bring the bank back to solvency.

What x is could be a matter for policy discussions, and could evolve over time. But a policy that set x=5% would mean that the EU is only ruling out bailouts that would place enormous burdens on the state. Indeed, given the state of Euro area public finances, there simply isn’t room for another round of expensive bank bailouts so an approach of this sort may help to reduce the perceived riskiness of much of Europe’s sovereign debt.

This policy could see the remaining Anglo senior bondholders receive severe haircuts without implying a contagion effect for other institutions apart from those the market suspect to be severely insolvent and to which states should probably be reluctant to offer blanket liability guarantees.

But, of course, such a policy would tradeoff state and private sector interests in a balanced way and, as I argue in this paper, M. Trichet’s approach to the question of debt defaults has consistently been characterised by dogma rather than balance.

Monetary Dialogue Briefing Papers: September 2011

The latest collection of briefing papers for the European Parliament’s Monetary Dialogue with the ECB are available here (click on 4.10.2011). There are nine papers (including one by me) discussing Jean-Claude Trichet’s term as ECB President and the challenges facing his successor.