… or so it seems. Kerin Hope reports in the FT that
[t]he Greek parliament has approved a law proposed by the leftwing Syriza-led government overturning civil service reforms by the previous government aimed at streamlining the country’s inefficient public sector.
13’000 civil servants are to be rehired. The “institutions” have not been consulted. The municipal police force will be revived.
Peter Spiegel reports in the FT that
Greece is so far off course on its $172bn bailout programme that it faces losing vital International Monetary Fund support unless European lenders write off significant amounts of its sovereign debt, the fund has warned Athens’ eurozone creditors.
Update (May 6, 2015)
According to other reports the IMF downplays disagreement among lenders. Peter Spiegel and Stefan Wagstyl report in the FT:
Officials involved in the talks said the IMF was not seeking large-scale debt relief immediately. Instead, it was warning that any concessions to Athens that allowed the government to post lower budget surpluses — the likely trajectory of the current talks — would require debt relief to make up the difference.
And Ht reports in the NZZ: According to an IMF spokesperson
Poul Thomsen, der Chef der Europaabteilung des Fonds, [hat] in jener Sitzung darauf hingewiesen, dass der Bedarf an zusätzlicher Finanzierung und an Schuldenerleichterungen zur Sicherstellung der Schuldentragfähigkeit umso grösser werde, je mehr man in den Verhandlungen von den ursprünglichen, 2012 vereinbarten Massnahmen und Zielen (des zweiten Hilfspakets) abweiche.
… Doch Moscovici betonte am Dienstag, über die Schulden werde man erst nach einer Einigung über das Reformpaket reden können. Es ist ein offenes Geheimnis, dass dannzumal auch über ein drittes Hilfspaket gesprochen werden muss.
Richtig ist laut Verhandlungskreisen, dass der IMF an den Treffen der «Brussels Group» eine besonders harte Haltung gegenüber Athen einnimmt. Er muss seine eigenen Regeln unter anderem bezüglich der Schuldentragfähigkeit einhalten, um weitere Gelder auszahlen zu können. Am anderen Ende des Spektrums der beteiligten Institutionen steht die EU-Kommission, die ein Auseinanderbrechen der Euro-Zone um fast jeden Preis verhindern will. Werde deren Irreversibilität angetastet, komme sofort die Frage auf, wer der Nächste sei, sagte Moscovici.
In the meantime, the Greek government argues that disagreement among “institutions” makes it impossible to find a compromise. Panagis Galiatsatos reports in the NZZ:
… der Internationale Währungsfonds (IMF) bestehe mit Vehemenz auf strukturellen Reformen (Rentenreform, Liberalisierung des Arbeitsmarkts) und mehr Flexibilität bei der Bestimmung der Primärüberschusses, weil er von einem weiteren Schuldenschnitt ausgehe. Im Gegensatz dazu verlange die EU-Kommission, die einen Schuldenschnitt partout nicht wolle, hohe Primärüberschüsse. Das beweise, dass die Gläubiger in keinem Verhandlungsfeld kompromissbereit seien, während die griechische Regierung Kompromissbereitschaft signalisiert habe.
In a blog post, John Cochrane explains why a Greek default need not trigger Grexit. And he warns that associating the two could trigger a (faster) bank run.
In a Vox column, Michal Kobielarz, Burak Uras and Sylvester Eijffinger argue that the re-emergence of spreads between peripheral and core Eurozone countries at the beginning of the Greek crisis reflected contagion fears. They write:
… we explicitly model the endogenous bailout decision of the European Monetary Union. We assume that:
- A country that defaults on its sovereign debt can no longer remain in the EMU, unless it is bailed out;
- The union values each country’s membership and, therefore, suffers a loss if a country exits; and
- The marginal loss associated with allowing a country to leave the union is highest if that particular country is the first to leave (first-exit effect).
… once the first country is gone, letting a second country default and leave the union is not that costly anymore.
On Project Syndicate, Raquel Fernández and Jonathan Portes offer four lessons from the Argentinian default in 2001 for Greece:
… if the economics are on your side, you can and should ignore politicians prophesying disaster. … a short period of political turmoil can cost surprisingly little compared to a long period of mindless pursuit of misconceived policies. But … Greece must acknowledge that its fundamental problems are of its own making. … Greece is unlikely to enjoy the breathing space provided by a commodity boom. If it is to place itself on the road to a sustainable recovery, it has no time to lose.
In a Vox column, Thomas Philippon suggests a 3% rather than 4.5% primary surplus target on fairness grounds. His central points are:
Greece ran a reckless fiscal policy during the boom years, wasting much of the money that it received. There is no question that Greece needs a strong dose of fiscal consolidation. However, Greece’s debt should have been restructured much earlier. This restructuring was prevented by legitimate fears of contagion, and it is not fair to ask Greece to pay for that delay, which reflected a general lack of preparedness among Eurozone policymakers.
Philippon’s estimate is similar to another estimate by Paolo Manasse.
John Cochrane does not believe that a Greek default would trigger Grexit.
In a Vox column, Paolo Manasse estimates that
rather than running a structural primary surplus of the order of 5% of potential output, as envisaged in the IMF projection …, Greece could get away with a number close to 3.75%.
Werner Marti reports in the NZZ that in contrast to events in 2001, Argentina’s latest default has not generated significant additional costs for the typical Argentinian household. Additional, that is, to the costs that households had to bear because their country had already mostly been excluded from international capital markets at affordable rates.
Laut allen unseren Gesprächspartnern ist dieses Ereignis an den Argentiniern weitgehend folgenlos vorbeigegangen, denn das Land hatte bereits zuvor keinen Zugang zu internationalen Krediten mit zahlbaren Zinssätzen. Dies heisst natürlich nicht, dass sich mittel- und langfristig das Investitionsklima nicht weiter verschlechtern wird, falls die Präsidentin den Konflikt mit den von ihr als «Geierfonds» bezeichneten Gläubigern nicht doch noch löst.
Marti also reports about new trains that take commuters from Buenos Aires to the Tigre-Delta. They are imported from China, and financed with Chinese credit.
Journal of Monetary Economics 68(S), December 2014. PDF.
How does sovereign risk shape the maturity structure of public debt? We consider a government that balances benefits of default, due to tax savings, and costs, due to output losses. Debt issuance affects subsequent default and rollover decisions and thus, current debt prices. This induces welfare costs beyond the consumption smoothing benefits from the marginal unit of debt. The equilibrium maturity structure minimises these welfare costs. It is interior with positive gross positions and shortens during times of crisis and low output, consistent with empirical evidence.
In the tenth chapter of “Across the Great Divide: New Perspectives on the Financial Crisis,” John Cochrane argues that at its core, the financial crisis was a run and thus, policy responses should focus on mitigating the risk of runs (blog posts by Cochrane on the same topic can be found here and here). Some excerpts:
… demand deposits, fixed-value money-market funds, or overnight debt … [should be] backed entirely by short-term Treasuries. Investors who want higher returns must bear price risk. …
Banks can still mediate transactions, of course. For example, a bank-owned ATM machine can deliver cash by selling your shares in a Treasury-backed money market fund … Banks can still be broker-dealers, custodians, derivative and swap counterparties and market makers, and providers of a wide range of financial services, credit cards, and so forth. They simply may not fund themselves by issuing large amounts of run-prone debt.
If a demand for separate bank debt really exists, the equity of 100 percent equity-financed banks can be held by a downstream institution or pass-through vehicle that issues equity and debt tranches. That vehicle can fail and be resolved in an hour …
Rather than outlawing short-term debt, Cochrane suggests to levy corrective taxes on run-prone liabilities. Moreover:
… technology allows us to overcome the long-standing objections to narrow banking. Most deeply, “liquidity” no longer requires that people hold a large inventory of fixed-value, pay-on-demand, and hence run-prone securities.
… electronic transactions can easily be made with Treasury-backed or floating-value money-market fund shares, in which the vast majority of transactions are simply netted by the intermediary. … On the supply end, $18 trillion of government debt is enough to back any conceivable remaining need for fixed-value default-free assets.
Cochrane rejects the claim that the need for money-like assets can only be met by banks that “transform” maturity or liquidity. He argues that current regulation reflects a history of piecemeal responses that triggered the need for additional measures; and he points out that the shadow banking system creates run risks because a “broker-dealer may have used your securities as collateral for borrowing” to fund proprietary trading.
Cochrane debunks crisis lingo and clarifies links between aggregate variables:
The only way to consume less and invest less is to pile up government debt. So a “flight to quality” and a “decline in aggregate demand” are the same thing.
He questions the need for fixed value securities other than short-term government debt as means of payment or savings vehicle; offers a short history of financial regulation; and deplores regulatory discretion.
The Economist discusses the consequences of issuing sovereign debt under foreign law. Investors in Greek government debt did better if they owned paper governed by English law—these series escaped the retroactive addition of collective-action clauses that Greece added to its domestic law bonds in 2012 before renegotiating with its creditors. For Argentine debt the situation may be reversed, due to the New York court decision in the case of Elliott Management against the Republic of Argentina. Indeed, default risk might be lower for Argentine domestic-law bonds.
CEPR Discussion Paper 7093, December 2008. PDF.
We analyze how sovereign risk paired with social costs of default shapes the maturity structure of public debt. A government without commitment power balances benefits of default, due to tax savings, and costs, due to output losses. Debt issuance affects subsequent default and rollover decisions and thus, current debt prices. This induces welfare costs beyond the consumption smoothing benefits from the marginal unit of debt. The equilibrium choice of short- versus long-term debt issuance minimizes these welfare costs. Consistent with empirical evidence, closed-form solutions of the model predict an interior maturity structure with positive gross positions and a shortening of the maturity structure during times of crisis and low output. In simulations, the model replicates additional features of the data.