Author: Patrick Honohan

No wonder it’s hard to interpret monetary statistics

Who would be a monetarist these days? Most monetary policy types are scrambling to re-estimate behavioural relationships.

And then there are the window-dressing operations, which are now revealed to have been exceptionally large in Ireland around the time the Government had to rescue the banks at end-September 2008.

No wonder it is hard to make sense of deposit and monetary movements at that time. In a footnote at my paper in the crisis conference I was reduced to hand-waving: “It is striking that these events have not left a very prominent track on the monetary aggregates. The evidence of a cash crunch at end-September is very muted…though of course we do not have day-by-day figures for the last week in September).”

Now we begin to know why.

Government buys some bank preference shares

Details of the much discussed recapitalization plan for the two main banks have finally been announced as approved by the Government.

In terms of financial restructuring the plan is modest enough. There is only modest dilution of shareholders; the government’s reluctance to take ownership is evident. And there is nothing yet on removing bad assets to be managed separately (though the government statement expresses interest in pursuing this line in light of international developments).

The bank’s books now imply that between them they will now have close to €20 billion in core Tier 1 capital. Out of the money options embedded in the scheme suggest that at least one side of the deal is anticipating a vigorous rebound in the banks’ ability to raise private capital.

Meanwhile Bank of Ireland have taken the opportunity to revise their estimates of prospective loan losses over the next two years by up to €2.2 billion — less than the injection of capital. Of course this is far less than the figures being bandied around by the more strident commentators, so we may look forward to seeing in due course who is right.

But negligible share price reactions so far this morning and over the past few days suggest that the market still assumes that the underlying value of the banks’ equity shareholders claims may not have moved out of the negative range.

An interesting feature is the way in which the Government is sourcing the funds. They could have just issued some new bonds and placed them in the banks’ portfolio, but they have gone for drawing on the NPRF. However, there’s a wrinkle: “€4 billion will come from the Fund’s current resources while €3 billion will be provided by means of a frontloading of the Exchequer contributions for 2009 and 2010.” I’m still trying to figure out what difference this wrinkle makes to the different measures of Government deficit/borrowing in 2009 and 2010.

A European solution to wide Irish spreads

Influential Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe argues in a Vox piece that ECB should be buying Irish and other high-yield eurozone sovereign bonds in the secondary market to correct what he describes as “panic” pricing. I think he’s got a point and it would certainly help stabilize expectations about fiscal prospects here and in those other countries.

It’s certainly no more radical than actions currently being taken by the Fed to stabilize their markets. A promising idea?

Foir Teoranta Nua?

A report in this morning’s Sunday Independent flies the kite for a new State Agency to invest equity in private companies. Inevitably, this will remind some of Foir Teoranta, a state agency which was officieally described as a lender-of-last-resort to private companies in the 1970s and 1980s.

Founded in 1972, Foir Teoranta’s stated objective was “to provide reconstruction finance for potentially viable industrial concerns which are unable to raise capital from the normal commercial sources.”

I’m not aware of a systematic analysis of Foir Teo’s effectiveness in that period. Maybe readers can remember more. But my impression is that, on its dissolution in 1991, it was not widely regarded as having been a brilliant success.

So what would make a new company of this type successful? The Indo’s article confirms that it would be well-managed, so that’s all right. But what else? The intended emphasis is said to be on equity, rather than debt (which was Foir’s main instrument). But is that a strength or a weakness in the current climate? How would it complement the European Investment Bank’s EIF, which seems to be in the same territory?

Would it be better to think in terms of a partial credit guarantee scheme instead? After all, if the banks are to receive huge injections of government capital, should one not be thinking of them as a natural source of finance to keep viable firms going? Partial credit guarantee schemes have been the policy instrument of choice for governments wishing to expand credit to small and medium enterprises, and there is an astonishing number of such schemes around the world. However here too there are severe risks; my recent review of these schemes emphasizes the drawbacks and the need for careful scheme design, if damage is to be avoided.

Irish bond spreads

I was idly looking for patterns in the daily evolution of eurozone government bond spreads (like you do) and thought I would share some findings. The spread of Irish Government bonds over the 10-year German benchmark have of course trended upward during the period since early September 2008 to last week:

If we compute principal components of the spreads of ten euro-currencies we can try to isolate the different factors: separating factors that affect all countries from those that affect Ireland in relative isolation.

Using daily changes in the spreads, the first three principal components explain 80% of the total variation in the ten series.

All ten bonds have roughly equal loadings on the first PC (which alone explains 62%). We can therefore think of PC1 as measuring fluctuations in general aversion to credit risk.

PC2 seems to measure a component which is irrelevant to Ireland — from the loadings this one looks like Club Med vs the North.

But PC3 is an almost Ireland-specific factor, much smaller loadings on the other countries. The big action in PC3 is on just three almost consecutive days in January: the 16th (Anglo nationalization), 19th and 21st.

To me this illustrates just how easily spooked this particular market is. Anglo nationalization was not even demonstrably bad news. When will it settle down to a realistic assessment of Irish risks?

Note:

The linear regression equation explaining changes in the Irish spread in terms of three principal components is (t-stats in parentheses):

ΔIreland = 0.020 + 0.015 PC1 + 0.042 PC3 + 0.024 PC4
(17.7) (32.7) (32.0) (15.6)
RSQ=0.958 DW=2.16

The constant term reflects the general upward trend in Ireland’s spread (which is not explainable by this method).

(Of course there are many methodological tricks one could explore, but it’s getting late and this seems enough for the present. Probably some readers do this stuff for a living!)