Category: Fiscal Policy

Bond Purchases as the Tool of Choice for Tackling the Debt Crisis?

The FT is reporting that the Christine Lagarde is the latest high-level official to offer tentative support for bond purchases by the EFSF as a central element in the reform of liquidity support measures.

Christine Lagarde, French finance minister, said France was ready to discuss allowing the eurozone’s €440bn ($588bn) bail-out fund to start buying bonds of struggling European economies amid signs of consensus that it would become the primary new tool for tackling Europe’s ongoing debt crisis.

How significant a development would this be? The first thing to note is that ECB bond purchases have failed to bring market yields to affordable levels. While probably helping to a degree, the ECB’s secondary-market purchases have lacked commitment and provide no real certainty to investors on how high yields could rise.  Secondary market purchases by the EFSF are unlikely to be much more effective unless operated at a very different scale.

In principle, however, official primary-market bond purchases could provide guaranteed funding at some maximum interest rate. This maximum rate could be set high enough to create strong incentives to rely on market funding. I would presume that the total amount of funding would be capped and the programme would have a time limit. But because they involve purchases of ordinary bonds, concern about the seniority of official creditors should be lessened. Overall, the existence of such an official buyer of last resort should give market investors reasonable confidence that governments would be able to roll over their borrowing as bonds mature over a significant time period. The proposal has the potential to provide support to a country facing difficult market conditions without crowding out longer-term private investors from the market; such crowding out appears to be a major shortcoming of current support measures.

Of course, the devil is in the detail, and there is little concrete yet about how such bond purchases would actually operate. It is also unclear whether these new facilities would be available to countries already in support programmes. But it is an interesting development.

Fit For Purpose Bailouts

One of the disappointing things about the bailout and associated adjustment programme is that it has done little to lower the perceived probability of an eventual Irish default. I know that many readers believe Ireland is fundamentally insolvent, and so are not overly surprised. At this stage, however, there is growing recognition that the structure of the European bailouts also makes it difficult for countries to regain market access. Key European policy makers have indicated a willingness to revisit the arrangements, though this will have to go beyond the relatively straightforward option of increasing the size of the support funds.

I grapple with the reasons why the current structure of the bailouts is itself an impediment to regaining creditworthiness in a piece for the business section of today’s Irish Times (article here).

End-Year Exchequer Returns

The end-year numbers are out: the statement is here.

More on sectoral financial balances

David McWilliams discusses the Irish version of the ‘Gavyn Davies’ sector financial balances graph in the Irish Independent today. He makes two points. The first is to highlight the restoration of the foreign sector balance in recent years, which he interprets as meaning that, absent the banking crisis, the government would not have needed to seek EU/IMF funding given the availability of sufficient domestic savings to fund the government deficit.

His second point is that the chart shows that austerity will not work because, if the private sector keeps saving, then either the government deficit remains high (as a result of a further contraction of the economy) or there is a build up in the current account surplus on the balance of payments, which he also sees as undesirable because it means that “we will export capital to the rest of the world for them to use, while projects in Ireland are starved of capital”.

While the first point may be true in the sense that the state would not have faced the downgrade on its sovereign debt in the absence of the banking crisis, I think the second conclusion is wrong.

Continue reading “More on sectoral financial balances”

Irish Version of Gavyn Davies’ Graph

Tony Leddin and I have included a version of this type of graph in successive editions of our textbook The Macroeconomy of Ireland.
Here are two slides showing the data for Ireland from 1970 to 2009.

(It proved easier to post a link to Flickr than to go through to rigmarole of uploading via this site!)

Happy Christmas!