Author: Karl Whelan

Bailout Interest Rate White Flag Department

Journalists sometimes get things wrong, so I’m going to phrase this as follows. Tell me this isn’t true:

Minister of State Brian Hayes has said the Government is looking for a 0.6% reduction in the bailout interest rate during its ongoing negotiations with the EC and the ECB.

Mr Hayes told RTÉ’s Drivetime programme that this would amount to a saving of €150m per year on the remaining amount of the loans which has not yet been drawn down.

All the signs are now that the government has gone into white flag mode on this one (what with the little-remarked-upon previous concession on Anglo-INBS bank bondholders, the flag’s had a busy week).  The key thing to watch for here is the approach of claiming lower and lower figures for what an interest rate reduction can achieve, with the benefit now down to €150 million per year.

Look, this isn’t rocket science. Greece, which hasn’t been very successful in implementing its package, received an interest rate cut of one percent in March. No Irish government could possibly be looking for less than a similar cut of one percent. We are borrowing €45 billion from the EU, so a one percent cut would save us €450 million a year, three times the figure being quoted. With an average maturity of seven and a half years, let’s call it seven, this would save the Irish taxpayer €3.15 billion or about €700 a head. It’s not a game-changer on the debt stability front but it’s not worth dismissing either.

Focusing on getting a cut in the remaining loans that have been drawn down is a red herring. It doesn’t matter that the EU has already sourced funds to lend to us as what we’re discussing cutting here is the EU’s own margin on these loans.

The only possible reason to define down the potential gains from an interest rate cut is to prepare the public for failure to achieve this cut, at which point we’ll be told that it wasn’t important.

Any hope that we might show some backbone on this issue (a la Namawinelake) is fading.

Update: Looking at yesterday’s Dail proceedings, one can find Minister Noonan stating that a one percent reduction in our interest rate will save us about €200 million a year. I know the Minister has the combined brain power of the Department of Finance officials on his side but it still seems to me that one percent of €45 billion is €450 million.

Bank of Ireland Set for Majority State Ownership

Bank of Ireland have released details of their capital raising plans.  The fraction of government ownership of the bank will depend upon how many subordinated bondholders take equity instead of an alternative cash offer. Various scenarios are presented but it seems pretty likely that the bank will end up in majority state ownership. So we’re likely to have nationalised all our domestic banks. We await the long-predicted frogs and locusts.

Schauble Proposes Greek Maturity Extension

It’s being discussed in the comments already but it’s worth giving German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble’s letter to the ECB, IMF and Ecofin ministers its own thread. The key proposal:

This means that any agreement on 20 June has to include a clear mandate — given to Greece possibly together with the IMF — to initiate the process of involving holders of Greek bonds. this process has to lead to a quantified and substantial contribution of bondholders to the support effort, beyond a pure Vienna initiative approach. Such a result can best be reached through a bond swap leading to a prolongation of the outstanding Greek sovereign bonds by seven years, at the same time giving Greece the necessary time to fully implement the necessary reforms and regain market confidence.

Just to be parochial about this for a minute, this raises an interesting question. If this approach was implemented successfully and did not trigger a financial crisis (I know some disagree — this is a hypothetical question) what are the chances that a similar restructuring would not be part of any potential second EU-IMF deal for Ireland?

Professor Sinn Misses the Target

I’ve written a post at the IIEA blog commenting on Hans Werner Sinn’s recent columns on the operation of the Eurosystem. Sinn has made some seriously incorrect claims and followed them up with dangerous policy recommendations. These columns have been cited approvingly by Martin Wolf, Paul Krugman and Felix Salmon over the past week.

Felix, however, has now read this post by Olaf Storbeck of Handelsblatt and doesn’t seem sure who is correct on these issues: He’s looking for “a central-banking wonk out there who fancies adjudicating this dispute”.

Well, with 11 years experience working in central banks, I suspect I meet the job requirements. I wrote my post before seeing Storbeck’s but hopefully my arguments back his up to help counter Professor Sinn’s somewhat wilder claims.

LBS on Private Sector Involvement

With things heating up in Greece, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi today outlines his case against debt restructuring in Greece. He argues four points:

First, as I already mentioned, it would not be a way to prevent taxpayers from suffering the consequences of bad investment decisions. In our Monetary Union, given the integration of financial markets and the single monetary policy, the taxpayers of the creditor countries would suffer in any case. According to the Financial Times, for instance, a default on Greece’s debt would cost the German taxpayers alone “at least €40 billion”.

Second, this would be a way to punish patient investors, who are sticking to their investment and have not sold their bonds yet, and are confident that with the adjustment programme the country will get back on its feet. Restructuring would instead reward the investors who exited the market earlier or short-sold the sovereign bond, speculating that they would gain out of a restructuring.

Third, it would destabilise the euro area financial markets by creating incentives for short-term speculative behaviour. Given that markets are forward-looking, they would try to anticipate any difficulty faced by a sovereign by short-selling their positions, thus triggering the crisis. This would discourage investment in the euro area because of its potential volatility and perverse market dynamics.

Finally, such a measure would delay any return to the market by a sovereign, because no market participant would be willing to start reinvesting in the country for a long period if they know that this kind of investment might at some stage be penalised. This would thus discourage private sector involvement and oblige the official sector to increase its financial contribution.

These don’t strike me as very strong points.

On the first point, well yes “taxpayers” in Germany who own Greek bonds will lose out but the bonds are already trading at a huge discount to face value so, for many, the losses have already been taken and the price of the bonds factors in a restructuring.

The second point amounts to saying we should reward people who make wildly inaccurate judgments about the Greek macroeconomic situation, i.e. those who “are confident that with the adjustment programme the country will get back on its feet” should be rewarded. Should those investors who believe in Santa Claus get cheques from the EU and the IMF at Christmas?

The third point that investors would look to sell sovereign bonds of peripheral countries in anticipation of a restructuring appears to ignore that this has already happened. For example, Irish sovereign bond pricing is based on the assumption of a restructuring.

The final point, that a restructuring would delay Greece’s return to the market is debatable. Even if debt ratios stabilised over the next few years, private creditors will still see huge risks. A restructuring that restores sustainability, however, would be more likely to restore access to private bond markets.

If these are the best points the ECB have, you can see why they’re losing the argument.