Ireland Goes Bust, Irish Bank Run

There was a bank run in Ireland on Wednesday. LCH Clearnet, a London based clearinghouse, surprised the markets by announcing it would increase margin requirements on Irish debt by 15 percent. That's all it took to send investors fleeing for the exits.

Yields on Irish bonds spiked sharply as banks tried to close positions or raise the capital needed to meet the new requirements. The Irish 10-year bond soared to 8.9 percent by day's end, more than 6 percentage points higher than "risk free" German sovereign debt. The ECB will have to intervene. Ireland is on its way to default. This is what a 21st century bank run looks like. Terms suddenly change in the repo market, where banks get their funding, and the whole system begins to teeter.

It's a structural problem in the so-called shadow banking system for which there's no remedy. Conventional banks exchange bonds with shadow banks for short-term loans agreeing to repurchase (repo) them at a later date. But when investors get nervous about the solvency of the bank, the collateral gets a haircut which makes it more expensive to fund operations. That sends bond yields skyrocketing increasing the liklihood of default. In this case, the debt-overhang from a burst development bubble is bearing down on the Irish government threatening to bankrupt the country. Ireland is in dire straights. Here's an excerpt from an article in this week's Irish Times which sums it up:

"Until September, Ireland had the legal option of terminating the bank guarantee on the grounds that three of the guaranteed banks had withheld material information about their solvency, in direct breach of the 1971 Central Bank Act. The way would then have been open to pass legislation along the lines of the UK’s Bank Resolution Regime, to turn the roughly €75 billion of outstanding bank debt into shares in those banks, and so end the banking crisis at a stroke.

With the €55 billion repaid, the possibility of resolving the bank crisis by sharing costs with the bondholders is now water under the bridge. Instead of the unpleasant showdown with the European Central Bank that a bank resolution would have entailed, everyone is a winner. Or everyone who matters, at least." ("If you thought the bank bailout was bad, wait until the mortgage defaults hit home", Morgan Kelley, Irish Times)

So, the Irish government could have let the bankers and bondholders suffer the losses, but decided to bail them out and pass the debts along to the taxpayers instead. Sound familiar? Only, in this case, the obligations exceed the country's ability to pay. Austerity measures alone will not fix the problem. Eventually, the debt will have to be restructured and the losses written down. Here's another clip from Kelly's article:

"As a taxpayer, what does a bailout bill of €70 billion mean? It means that every cent of income tax that you pay for the next two to three years will go to repay Anglo’s (bank) losses, every cent for the following two years will go on AIB, and every cent for the next year and a half on the others. In other words, the Irish State is insolvent: its liabilities far exceed any realistic means of repaying them....

Two things have delayed Ireland’s funeral. First, in anticipation of being booted out of bond markets, the Government built up a large pile of cash a few months ago, so that it can keep going until the New Year before it runs out of money. Although insolvent, Ireland is still liquid, for now.

Secondly, not wanting another Greek-style mess, the ECB has intervened to fund the Irish banks. Not only have Irish banks had to repay their maturing bonds, but they have been hemorrhaging funds in the inter-bank market, and the ECB has quietly stepped in with emergency funding to keep them going until it can make up its mind what to do."

Ireland has enough cash to get through the middle of next year, but then what? The bad news has rekindled fears of contagion among the PIIGS. Greece is a basketcase and Portugal's bond yields have spiked in recent weeks. Portugal's 10-year bond hit 7.33% by Wednesday's close. The euro plunged to $1.37 even though the Fed is trying to weaken the dollar by pumping another $600 billion into the financial system. Troubles on the periphery are escalating quickly dragging the 16-nation union into another crisis. This is from the Wall Street Journal:

"For a decade, Ireland was the EU's superstar. A skilled work force, high productivity and low corporate taxes drew foreign investment. The Irish, once the poor of Europe, became richer than everyone but the Luxemburgers. Fatefully, they put their newfound wealth in property.

As the European Central Bank held interest rates low, Ireland saw easy credit for construction loans and mortgages. Developers turned docklands into office towers and sheep pastures into subdivisions. In 2006, builders put up 93,419 homes, three times the rate a decade earlier....

The party ended in 2008, when the property bubble popped and the global economy tipped into recession...by September, Irish banks were struggling to borrow quick cash for daily expenses. The government thought they faced a classic liquidity squeeze. Ireland—whose hands-off regulator had assigned just three examiners to two major banks—didn't recognize the deeper problem: Banks had made too many bad loans, whose defaults would leave the lenders insolvent." ("Ireland's Fate Tied to Doomed Banks", Charles Forelle and David Enrich, Wall Street Journal)

The Irish government hurriedly put together a new agency, the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), to buy to toxic bank loans at steep discounts., but the banks books were in much worse condition than anyone realized, more than €70 billion in bad loans altogether. By absorbing the debts, the government is condemning its people to a decade of grinding poverty and a deficit that's 32% of GDP, a record for any country in the EU.

On Thursday, at the G-20 conference in Seoul, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, said that he was following developments in Ireland closely and that he would be ready to act if necessary. The EU has set up a €440bn bail-out fund (The European Financial Stability Fund) that can be activated in the event of an emergency, although critics say that the fund is more aspirational than a reality. The crisis in Ireland will test whether the countries that made commitments to the fund will keep-up their end of the bargain or not. If they refuse, the EU project will begin to splinter and break apart.

Ireland will surely need a bailout, although not just yet. For a while the ECB can maintain the illusion of solvency by funneling liquidity to banks via its emergency facilities. That way, bondholders in Germany and France get their pound of flesh before the ship begins to take on water. All the risk-takers and speculators will be "made whole" again before the full-force before the debts are shifted onto Irish workers. Here's how Kelly sums it up:

"Ireland faced a painful choice between imposing a resolution on banks that were too big to save or becoming insolvent, and, for whatever reason, chose the latter. Sovereign nations get to make policy choices, and we are no longer a sovereign nation in any meaningful sense of that term."

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China to play role in General Motors IPO

DETROIT (AP) — Among the banks helping General Motors with its initial public stock offering next week are two identified by initials only: ICBC and CICC.

Americans uncomfortable with U.S. government ownership of General Motors may want to hear more: One of those banks is the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, one of China's four big central government banks. The other, China International Capital Corp., is a joint venture run primarily by Central Huijin Investment Ltd., an arm of the state, and Morgan Stanley.

This is the first time Chinese government banks have participated in a major U.S.-issued IPO, according to IPO tracking firm Dealogic. The banks are listed as co-managers in the offering, meaning they will sell a portion of the new shares.

Chinese automaker SAIC, GM's partner in China, is finalizing plans to buy a roughly 1 percent stake, worth about $500 million, in GM's IPO, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. SAIC is owned by the Shanghai city government.

Other foreign investors that are interested include several sovereign wealth funds located in the Middle East and Asia. The Journal says those funds, which manage the finances of royal families and some nations, could invest $1 billion in GM's IPO.

There could be political backlash for President Barack Obama, who has spent the past week in Asia addressing economic issues, like currency exchange differences between the U.S. and China. Obama has argued that China artificially deflates its currency, the yuan, in an attempt to make its exports cheaper.

Many Americans were unhappy when the U.S. bailed out GM, calling the company "Government Motors."

GM 's Nov. 18 stock offering will reduce the U.S. Treasury's stake in the company from 61 percent to 43 percent, and will help payback the more than $50 billion that taxpayers invested in GM to keep it from collapsing. More stock offerings will happen in the next year or so, letting the government fully divest from the automaker.

"It's a very political topic, but what Americans need to remember is that General Motors is an international company," says Rebecca Lindland, an analyst with IHS Automotive. "If we want to get our money back, we need to understand that they have to do business on a global basis."

The U.S. Treasury has been clear that international investors are welcome to invest in GM, and many outside the U.S. are considering taking stakes in the company.

"We expect that a large and diverse group of institutional investors will be offered an opportunity to participate, with no single investor or group of investors receiving a disproportionate share or unusual treatment," the Treasury said in a recent statement.

The U.S. has become a popular haven for Chinese investors, second only to Australia in attracting Chinese stock investments, says Derek Scissors, a research fellow at conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation. The first half of 2010 was a record year for China, Scissors says. China has sunk $45 billion into investments and engineering projects worldwide. About $1.6 billion of those investments came to the U.S.

In China, businesses operate with the funding and blessing of the government, says Tim Dunne, director of global automotive operations for J.D. Power and Associates. The government behaves like an interested shareholder, ensuring companies have competent management and ensuring the companies boost economic growth in their regions.

Many Chinese automakers are looking for a way into the U.S. market, he says. China is the largest car market in the world, but the U.S. is the most profitable, he says.

"The amount of money changing hands here is much greater," he says. The average selling price of a car in the U.S. is $27,500, compared with about $17,000 in China. "Multiply that over millions of vehicles, and it's quite a difference."

SAIC and GM already have a long-standing partnership in China -- GM could not sell cars in China without partnering with a local business -- and it's unclear what size stake SAIC may take in GM. The deal would need Chinese government approval.

Chris Theodore, president of consulting firm Theodore & Associates, says SAIC's investment in GM is likely an attempt to strengthen its ties with the automaker. Theodore, who was part of a group that tried to take over Volvo before it was sold to China's Geely group, says SAIC isn't the kind of company that can branch out into U.S. sales. Most of its models use GM technology and are essentially GM cars.

"They rely on GM for a lot of their profitability," Theodore says.

Michael Maduell, president of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, a California-based group that watches sovereign wealth fund investments, says global investors are looking at the U.S. because they believe the overall market is undervalued. Other potential investors in GM include Abu Dhabi's Mubadala and Singapore's Temasek, which are both known for actively investing in companies, Maduell says.

Investors are "looking at emerging markets, like China and India, but all those assets are overvalued," Maduell says. "America still has a lot of fantastic investment opportunities in real estate and small- to mid-cap stocks."

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Gary Shilling Sees `Significant' Stock Selloff Within 12 Months

Gary Shilling, who predicted the U.S. housing collapse, says the stock market is overvalued and foresees a “significant” selloff within a year as the Federal Reserve fails to stimulate economic growth.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has climbed 17 percent since July 2 as investors anticipated the Fed’s plan to buy $600 billion in Treasuries to boost growth. The benchmark gauge for U.S. equity trades for 15 times profit from the past year, up from 13.7 in July, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke previewed his strategy of quantitative easing in an Aug. 27 speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

“I don’t think it’s enough to make a great deal of difference,” Shilling, 73, president of the investment research firm A. Gary Shilling & Co. in Springfield, New Jersey, said in a telephone interview. “The earlier QE1 didn’t and I don’t think this will, either. The economy is weak and it doesn’t take very much of a shock to push it into negative territory. I don’t think that’s enough to justify where stocks are now.”

Shilling, who predicts real gross domestic product growth of 2 percent “and maybe less in the next couple of years,” said the government is out of options for fixing the economy.

No Magic Bullet

“There’s not much that can be done,” said Shilling. “There isn’t any magic bullet. There isn’t anything in my view that’s going to return us to the solid days of the 80s and 90s when consumers were spending freely. I don’t think that’s going to come back. The need to deleverage is just too great.”

The S&P 500 lost 1.2 percent to 1,199.21 as of 4 p.m. amid speculation China will lift interest rates. The index has fallen 2.2 percent since Nov. 5 for its first weekly decline in more than a month, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Shilling’s past predictions had mixed results. The economist forecast the recession that began in December 2007 and warned investors a year earlier that residential real estate was in a bubble that would burst. The S&P 500 lost 57 percent between October 2007 and March 2009.

With the S&P 500 at a 12-year low that month, he said that higher unemployment would curb consumer spending, leading to “weaker stocks.” An investor following his advice would have missed the start of an 80 percent rally.

Deflation Board Game

Shilling, a long-time market skeptic who once created a board game to show the dangers of deflation, earned a doctorate degree in economics at Stanford University, according to his website. In his book “The Age of Deleveraging,” which was published this month, he theorizes that the global economy will struggle for years. Other books include “Deflation: How to Survive and Thrive in the Coming Wave of Deflation” in 2002 and, “After the Crash: Recession or Depression: Business and Investment Strategies for a Deflationary World” in 1988, according to Amazon.com Inc.’s website.

The U.S. economy, which grew at a 2 percent annual pace in the third quarter, may enter a recession in the next year or two, Shilling said. The U.S. gross domestic product will grow 2.7 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2011 after 2009’s contraction, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The S&P 500 posted its biggest September-October rally since 1998 as economic data showed the threat of a recession is abating. The gauge extended the rally into November after the Labor Department reported a bigger-than-forecast decrease in jobless claims and as orders placed with factories and production rose to a five-month high.

Beating Estimates

Earnings have topped estimates at 76 percent of the 433 companies in the S&P 500 that have announced results since Oct. 7, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Net income has grown 29 percent for the group as sales increased 9.2 percent.

While estimates for U.S. corporate profit fell last quarter, they still indicate that S&P 500 companies will report record earnings in 2011. The equity benchmark is valued at about 12 times projected income for 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s the cheapest level since 1988, excluding the six months after New York-based Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, relative to reported profit from the past 12 months.

“Stock valuations remain attractive,” said James Dunigan, chief investment officer at PNC Wealth Management in Philadelphia, which oversees $105 billion. “The earnings prospects continue to be positive. We’ll likely get back to an economy which is expanding in the early part of 2011. The story is pretty good.”

Stock Returns

Shilling, who predicts that stocks will return 5 percent to 6 percent annually after inflation adjustments over the next decade, says that half of that will come from dividends and not from appreciation. The S&P 500’s dividend yield, currently at 1.92 percent, may rise to at least 3 percent, Shilling said, without specifying a time frame.

“You see a lot of companies being pressured to pay dividends,” he said. “Look at Microsoft. They borrowed money to pay dividends. It tells you that investors want dividends.”

In September, Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, sold $4.75 billion of bonds at the lowest coupons on record. A day earlier, the company raised its quarterly dividend by 23 percent to 16 cents and received approval from its board to sell as much as $6 billion in additional debt.

Shilling reiterated his view in an Oct. 4 interview with Bloomberg Radio that looming deflation means U.S. Treasuries are still attractive. He says the yield on the U.S. 30-year bond will drop to 3 percent within the next “couple of years” from about 4.3 percent. Shilling also said he doesn’t see a collapse of the U.S. dollar because of debt problems in Europe.

The euro slid to the lowest level in more than a month versus the dollar yesterday as concern that some European countries will have difficulty paying their debt and a drop in stocks curbed investors’ appetite for risk.

“The dollar is probably going to strengthen,” Shilling said. “We’re going to see increasing problems in Europe, led by Ireland. As a result, we’re seeing a rally in the dollar.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Rita Nazareth in New York at rnazareth@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Baker at nbaker7@bloomberg.net.

US asks China to raise yuan by January

Chinese government uged to hasten efforts toward reforming its currency exchange rate.

The United States has called on China to hasten its efforts toward reforming its currency exchange rate against the dollar by January of next year.

US President Barack Obama, who has repeatedly said the yuan's undervalued currency has hurt the US economy, urged Chinese officials to let the yuan rise against the dollar by the time Chinese President Hu Jintao visits Washington in January, Reuters reported on Saturday.

"President Hu Jintao's visit in January would be an important time to look at exactly what the quantum of progress has been on this," said United States' National Security Advisor Tom Donilan.

The United States “would like to see China proceed apace on these reforms, because it's important we think to China, but it's important to the world in terms of a stable economic path forward," Donilan added.

"The pacing of this is obviously a sovereign decision by them,” noted Donilan, who accompanies Obama at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Yokohama.

The US claims that the yuan has been artificially undervalued, saying that such a low rating keeps exports relatively cheap and gives Chinese exporters an unfair advantage over their rivals.

But China has warned that any sudden rise in the value of the unit would pummel its businesses and trigger massive unemployment.

Meanwhile, the Chinese president assured US officials that the existing currency rate would not wreak havoc on the US economy.

“We will continue to steadily move forward the reform of the exchange rate regime in a self-initiated, controllable and gradual manner," Hu said.

Earlier in March, Governor of the People's Bank of China Zhou Xiaochuan said Beijing would eventually shift away from its special exchange rate policy.

HA/TG/HRF

Obama’s economic view is rejected on world stage

Free trade deal with South Korea eludes president

By Sewell Chan, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and David E. Sanger


SEOUL — President Obama’s hopes of emerging from his Asia trip with the twin victories of a free trade agreement with South Korea and a unified approach to spurring global economic growth ran into resistance on all fronts yesterday, putting Obama at odds with his key allies and largest trading partners.

The most concrete trophy expected to emerge from the trip eluded his grasp: a long-delayed free trade agreement with South Korea, first negotiated by the Bush administration and then reopened by Obama, to have greater protections for US workers.

And as officials frenetically tried to paper over differences among the Group of 20 members with a vaguely worded communiqué to be issued today, there was no way to avoid discussion of the fundamental differences of economic strategy. After five largely harmonious meetings in the past two years to deal with the most severe downturn since the Depression, major disputes broke out between Washington and China, Britain, Germany, and Brazil.

Each rejected core elements of Obama’s strategy of stimulating growth before focusing on deficit reduction. Several major nations continued to accuse the Federal Reserve of deliberately devaluing the dollar last week in an effort to put the costs of America’s competitive troubles on trading partners, rather than taking politically tough measures to rein in spending at home.

The result was that Obama repeatedly found himself on the defensive. He and the South Korean president, Lee Myung Bak, had vowed to complete the trade pact by the time they met here; while Obama insisted that it would be resolved “in a matter of weeks,’’ without the pressure of a summit meeting it was unclear how the hurdles on nontariff barriers to US cars and beef would be resolved.

Obama’s meeting with China’s president, Hu Jintao, appeared to do little to break down Chinese resistance to accepting even nonbinding numerical targets for limiting China’s trade surplus. While Lael Brainard, the undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, said that the United States and China “have gotten to a good place’’ on rebalancing their trade, Chinese officials later archly reminded the Americans that as the issuers of the dollar, the main global reserve currency, they should consider the interests of the “global economy’’ and their own “national circumstances.’’

The disputes were not limited to America’s foreign partners. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner got into a trans-Pacific argument with one of his former mentors, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, after Greenspan wrote that the United States was “pursuing a policy of currency weakening.’’ Geithner shot back on CNBC that while he had “enormous respect’’ for Greenspan, “that’s not an accurate description of either the Fed’s policies or our policies.’’

Much of the rest of the world seemed to share Greenspan’s assessment. Moreover, Obama seemed to be losing the broader debate over austerity. The president has insisted that at a moment of weak private demand, the best way to spur economic growth is to have the government prime the pump with cheap credit and government stimulus programs. He quickly found himself in an argument with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

“You do hear the argument made sometimes: If you have a deficit, put off the action to deal with it because taking money out of the economy will reduce your growth rate,’’ Cameron said at the meeting. “I simply don’t accept that.’’

Merkel, in a more traditional German view reflective of her country’s history of hyperinflation before World War II, was equally adamant.

“I am not one, and Germany is not one, who says growth and fiscal consolidation are contradictory,’’ she said during a lunchtime address in Seoul. “They can go together, and it is essential to return to a sustainable growth path.’’ She also suggested that it was the job of deficit countries — like the United States and Britain, although she diplomatically avoided citing them — to increase their competitiveness rather than put limits on countries that had figured out how to get the world to buy their goods.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.