Below is the transcript for Transcript for Alasdair Macleod: All Roads in Europe Lead to Gold
Chris Martenson: Welcome to the PeakProsperity.com podcast and your host of course, Chris Martenson.Today we are going to take a quick detour back over into Europe because as you know, I just wrote a report talking about how this might be 2008 all over again. Of course what I am looking at in that report is the deterioration that I am seeing across Europe, thinking of Europe as a potential trigger point for a liquidity crisis whereas last time it was an institutional liquidity crisis centered around some dodgy debts that went bad and some derivatives thereupon that made it worse. This time similar dynamic, of course different players, different focus. Maybe it is happening in the sovereign debt side. Here to discuss that with us is our very own Alasdair MacLeod who has penned a couple of nice pieces for us and is sitting over in Europe; welcome Alasdair.
Alasdair Macleod: Thank you Chris.
Chris Martenson: Oh, so happy to have you again and I know I described you as our very own with a stretch, but I like to think we have a nice relationship going.
Alasdair MacLeod: It is nice to be part of the family.
Chris Martenson: Thank you for that. So, here’s the situation, Greece has elected a new government comprised of more powerful elements from both the left and the right, neither of which seems to have any interest, apparently, in honoring the prior bailout and/or austerity agreements. Spain seems to be under increasing fire, its banks were rudely downgraded recently by the ratings agencies, and Bankia specifically seems to be needing some help right here. Maybe has already experienced something of a bank run of sorts… maybe if we are reading between the lines right. GDP in Spain was just announced, dropped point three percent in the first quarter, so that confirms a return to recession there for Spain, I believe.
Let’s go to Italy, twenty-six large and medium banks just downgraded recently. GDP just announced contracted by point eight percent through the first three months of the year. That would give it its fourth recession since 2001; now pretty much in the bag. What is going on over there?
Alasdair Macleod: Well, I think you actually described it pretty well. Every horror you could imagine that we discussed last time we spoke about this is really, I am afraid, coming about. The Greek situation is entirely predictable: when you force enormous pressures on an economy and try and raise taxes from the private sector — a private sector which isn’t used to paying taxes because usually they find away around it — you start cutting pensions, you start cutting this, cutting that and the people revolt. They haven’t a clue what they are doing, but we get the revolt none the less and it looks like nobody can form a government; and it looks like there will be another election there and that will be probably in June. That won’t resolve anything unless by some miracle, some sense gets knocked into people’s heads. I wouldn’t like to say it gets knocked into people’s heads because it is not quite implied violence, which actually may not be too far beneath the surface in this one. No, it is not good and the French election with Hollande getting in tells us that the pressure is going to be to not go for so much austerity, so some sort of new middle way will have to be found. Not just there, but I think around Europe, which implies that the Germans are going to have to give a bit. I know it is not a fashionable thing to say, but I feel quite sorry for the Germans because it is their savings being chucked as good money after bad. That’s a mess and I think that the Spanish situation suddenly comes upon us. The yields I don’t think quite reflect this yet. I think they are only about what, six and a half percent or something.
Chris Martenson: Yeah, that is about right.
Alasdair Macleod: The yields should be north of ten, I think; the way this is going. So, we will see higher yields, which will equate to a turn of the screw on the rack and Italy as you point out; things not going so well there. The whole thing is a nightmare. I think the only thing I can say about this nightmare is that the overall debt situation is not quite as bad as America.
Chris Martenson: Well, so…
Alasdair Macleod: But that is small comfort and actually, causes further faults, which might make you, reach for the whiskey bottle, if you like. Really, Chris, I think all this is really coming to pass as we discussed. Bank runs, certainly the Spanish situation, we know the Greek banks have had a run on them. We know also that the Spanish banks have had a sort of run because this has been reflected in TARGET II. The TARGET II imbalances are reflecting as much as anything is capital flight and that is built up quite rapidly over the last two or three years and the build up has been accelerating as we discussed the other week. That is where we are, it is at least as bad as we said, and I think it is at least as bad as you read and probably even worse.
Chris Martenson: Right, so let’s unpack this little… the real question I am interested in addressing is what happens next. How does this unfold? I have read everything from let’s just focus it down to Greece for a minute. So, Greece leaves the Euro… I have read everything and they said that’s it, it is all over you can just put a fork in the Greek banking system, it will be an immediate run and collapse, they will not be able to get financing, it will just be a complete horrid mess, losses for everyone. To other people… other analysts who sort of toss their hands up and suggest, well it will be a little rough, but maybe not all… and uncertain… but they will get through it. So, what is the mechanism here? Lot of moving pieces, let’s start here.
We have heard about Greek bank withdrawals. People presumably are finally waking up and yanking their money out of their banks. I presume, either if they can’t get their hands on cash, that means they are pulling it out of one bank it is going into another. I am going to have to guess some of those banks are probably outside of Greece. Otherwise why would you pull your money from a Greek bank other than to avoid the potential losses that might come if Greece does decide to go with the Drachma and does some sort of a re-valuation? Which by definition of course, will result in losses for anybody who’s in an enforced part of that conversion. So, is that part of the mechanism here? Banks only have… first of all they’re fractional reserve banks, like banks everywhere, so yes, they have not only a bunch of assets on the books and a bunch of liabilities and they match roughly. But, when people are pulling money out, there can be an extraordinary mismatch developing because of course the loans are locked into fairly longish terms and the cash has to be produced on demand. For now, the ECB has said we will help you through that process, but there are concerns now that maybe the ECB saying we won’t even help you with that.
How does… I don’t even remotely understand how a bank survives that, but what do you see in this mechanism? Is that about what is happening here?
Alasdair Macleod: Well, let me first… your last point first. Let’s just address the ECB. The ECB can counteract any bank runs for banks within the Euro system, but it cannot recapitalize banks. That is down to individual governments working with their own national central banks. Therefore, ensuring liquidity is available is a short-term fix while more permanent arrangements are being put in place. Unfortunately, we don’t see the more permanent arrangements being put in place. That is where the ECB is and why it has a problem. It can’t continue to chuck money at keeping these banks afloat forever. There has to be, if you like, an exit plan.
If we look at Greece, a lot of money has left Greece. The estimate’s I have seen is roughly seventy-two billion in deposits has disappeared from the Greek banking system over the last two or three years. That must have been accelerating in the month or two. If you look at the Bank for International Settlement’s figures, at the end of 2011, Greece’s banks had foreign assets of a hundred and ninety-five billion and liabilities of a hundred and three billion. That is indicative of the amount of money, if you like, that has gone out into bank because normally you would expect those two figures to more or less balance. If you are running a bank, you do try to put that sort of discipline into your balance sheet and the Greeks would have done that as bankers anyway. The shortfall between those two is an indication of the stress that the banking system in Greece feels.
That indicates about half the foreign position as being unwound but it rightly makes a point. While foreigners can maybe unwind their positions as much as possible in terms of Greek exposure, it is not necessarily so easy for the Greek banks to do the same, and indeed, they won’t have quite the same motivation to do the same. The cash withdrawals that are going on at the moment are against a background of balance sheets which are already very, very badly skewed. The thing is really quite nasty there.
The other thing, which nobody has mentioned, is that there are about ninety billion dollars in derivative contracts involved in the Greek economy. This is not just government, but also local governments and towns and cities and all the rest of it. The counter parties to ninety billion must be getting a bit worried about that, I would think because that looks as if it will default. That is something that has to be caught worldwide. The people who have been most active in getting these derivative contracts going over time have been people like Deutsch Bank, Goldman Sachs and I suppose JP Morgan, I don’t know but anyway, that’s… so you can see the problems aren’t just limited to the government and some unfortunate Greek citizens who are caught in the middle of this.
Chris Martenson: Right, so let me take one point… a little diversion here. There is a lot of confusion around derivatives and how they operate and many times I hear it and sometimes I even talk about it this way, that in large measure a lot of derivative contracts are a zero sum game. These are the things that JP Morgan was caught up in, right? You and I might decide to exchange a billion dollar credit default swap with each other and neither of us owns the underlying. At the end of the day, that zeros out, my loss is your gain or vice versa. Where this doesn’t zero out is if I actually am holding the underlying. I have Greek debt, I have a billion dollars worth of it and what I want to do is protect that. You decide to go ahead and insure that for me so you do a credit default swap with me. You issue it, I buy it, I pay you some rate, let’s call it seven percent; seven hundred basis points on that. Then the underlying goes 'poof'. Those billion dollars actually go away. I want to be made whole on that, so you now owe me that billion dollars when actual… when the underlying actually goes sour, those losses are very real and those derivatives are the armature, they mechanism by which those losses get pushed out into the system. Is that right?
Alasdair Macleod: That is absolutely right. We are looking at potentially up to ninety billion dollars worth of derivatives which one side of those transactions is going to default. One side; it is not a balanced figure is it? You are absolutely right in pointing that out. I don’t know that it is necessarily as bad as that, but it is a problem that needs to be dealt with, addressed and contained. I think what they have to do as much as possible, is to try to work for a sensible outcome in this, which probably will involve Greece leaving the Euro zone, but maybe obtaining help from the ECB to set up a currency board. The reason I say that is that I think for Greece to return to the Drachma would be complete destruction. You would have a situation where people who owe money in Euros would still owe money in Euros. If the Greek government tried to change that by law, for starts, that could only apply to loans taken out in Euros in Greece; whereas a lot of these have been taken out in Euros elsewhere in the European Union. In any event, I think if they tried to do a law on this, it would be a retrospective, which would be open to legal challenge.
Meanwhile, if you have deposits in a Greek bank, you can be sure the Greek government would say we are going to redesignate those into new Drachmas, which would impoverish the depositors. When it comes to trade, I think everybody would just stay well clear. To go back to a new Drachma, I think is the most destructive path Greece can have. Now, they could do that on the basis that, if the European Union wanted to make an example of Greece, then this is a way in which they could just let them go hang. The importance of that would be that the situation for Greece should be so bad that no other member of the Euro zone would contemplate leaving the Euro zone. That is a possibility, but I think that is less likely than coming to terms in such a way to give Greece an exit. But if they do get an exit, again, they’ve got to have an exit in such a way that it hurts enough and anybody else who wants to take that exit would see, well it is actually probably more painful than staying where we are. It is a very difficult balance to achieve.
The people who will do this, I don’t believe are the politicians. It would have to be the sensible people in the ECB and perhaps some of the more back room boys who could put together some sort of face saving mechanism without this becoming too much of a political hot potato. It is very, very tricky Chris, it really is and quite honestly, the way political governance has been going in Europe, the chances of them getting some sort of orderly withdraw in the interest of continuing relationships, et cetera, et cetera, I think are actually probably slim against. That is what we are up against; this is not easy. There is no precedence for this at all and I know that lots and lots of people are saying it is got to return to the Drachma and you wrote I thought a quite well argued piece, sort of going in those lines. I just think that a new Drachma would collapse almost immediately. I think that a currency board in the Euro is actually a more sensible result given where we are. In order for that to happen, Greece would have to have the Euros, if you like, to back its own currency issuance. Then they would have to run it properly, so everything would have to be put in place, and this would actually work. I don’t know anyone thinking this way. This is the other trouble.
Chris Martenson: The only other thing I can think about would be some sort of a jubilee where the ECB just pays off Greek’s debts and says lets start over here. As I read it right now, if Greece does fully exit the Euro and then punts on all of its external liabilities, there are still three hundred and fifty billion of losses lurking out there potentially. It is quite a large number and as you say, the contagion fear is the one where if Greece gets away with it and Spain looks over and says that seems easier than trying to pay all these things off, they might do that too.
Alasdair Macleod: Yes, that is right and in Spain, you are looking like… it is a worse situation. Government debt alone is just under a trillion. A trillion dollars equivalent I should say and that is a lot of money. That is a lot of money. Italy is over two trillion dollars. That really is a very, very big one, so this contagion must not be allowed to happen. I just don’t know how this is going to pan out. I can’t see where the exit is. I can’t see where the happy ending is in this. This is the problem.
Chris Martenson: Right, so let’s talk about that for a second because you mentioned Hollande gets elected in and so there’s this general anti-austerity fervor in the political elections going on if we can interpret it that way. What really could Hollande or anybody really do to say I am off the path of austerity besides engage in deficit spending at the government level? They still have to fund that in the bond markets in some way, shape, or form. They don’t have their own printing presses. They don’t have a compliant Fed over their monetizing their sovereign debt to the tune of sixty-one percent of on the run issuance or anything lovely like that. Where and how would they even fund the opposite of austerity if it were their political desire to do so?
Alasdair Macleod: I think this is… you have come up to the nub of it because the answer is they can only provide it by an easy money policy from the ECB. In order to achieve that, there has to be some very serious arguments, if you like, between the Bundesbank representing the Germans in terms of monetary policy and the ECB itself and I see no alternative to an outcome where there is a far more expansionary policy. I don’t know, it might be QE but I think it is probably more likely that the ECB will be given a lot more fire power to try and keep the banking system going. Through the banking system, the bank is allowed to lend to the governments and to buy more debt to pay for the redemptions so the rollovers can continue. Now, here is something, which I think, does become quite important, and that is… this explains, I think, a little bit of the weakness that we have seen in the Euro in the last week and it would justify yet more weakness in the Euro. I would see the Euro going down quite a bit on this. I think that is a likely outcome.
Chris Martenson: Interesting, well I am going to propose that instead of LTRO3 that the ECB promote the HMSPP, that is the Hail Mary Speculative purchase program and they should just issue a trillion, which can be put into Facebook stock. I think that would solve a lot right here.
Alasdair Macleod: Yeah, well as a speculative proposition, it is a lot less speculative than chucking it at Spain and Greece perhaps.
Chris Martenson: You might be right. Oops.
Alasdair Macleod: We must not joke actually, because it is an extremely serious situation.
Chris Martenson: Well it is and the question of course is how does this all unfold and so, I hear you describing that there are a lot of political difficulties and realities, all of which imply there is a certain pace at which the potential solutions can be proposed, vetted and worked through the system. It is my sense that perhaps events are running a bit faster than that process can engage. Do you share that view?
Alasdair Macleod: Yes, I would agree with you entirely. It is… as so often happens in these things, they start slowly and the pace rather quickens. It is almost like it goes at an exponential growth rate if you could chart events. I think that this is going to accelerate now very rapidly. There is one positive outcome and that is if Greece leaves and they manage to work out sensible terms on the sort of lines perhaps that I suggested just now, then there may be a recovery in the markets, a sort of sigh of relief if you like. I don’t think I would put money on it. It is rather like betting on how far a dead cat might bounce. We might get a little bit of a pause in the increasing pace of events, but it would be a pause. I think it would only be a matter of a very short time before things start deteriorating again. You cannot have the banks getting into such difficulties without really very, very adverse consequences unless the ECB comes in very quickly and somehow manages to nip that in the bud. Ideally, as I have said before, if you can get governments perhaps to face up to the facts that they are spending more than they attract in income tax and can borrow in the markets, and actually do something about that, at least keep the banks going, then that is probably about the only way out. I have to say, the politicians are showing great reluctance to face up to reality of any sort and they have to problem of course, that as they do that, the people just chuck them out of office. It is a very, very difficult situation.
Chris Martenson: I suppose that… I have read a number of commentators who have asked what I think is a very logical question, which was; instead of feeding funds to banks and hoping that, they would do the right things with it, and of course, they don’t know what to do with it. Growth is not part of the equation right now, so the normal credit mechanisms are not operating quite the same. I think it was obvious, well; it was obvious to me that our credit markets after a sustained forty-year bubble, were probably going to be moribund for a period of time, but in Japan in the eighties through the nineties could have taught you the same lesson. It is confusing that the authorities gave… both in the U.S. and in the U.K., following Japan’s model I believe, gave one toss at this. Let’s just make credit and liquidity very easy for the banks and cross our fingers, close our eyes and hope for the best, when there’s another strain of thought, which said, if the banks were having so much difficulty with bad loans, why didn’t you make the funds available to the people? Now, people would have gotten the funds. What would they have done with them? Well, they would have paid off their debts and put them into the banking system. It would have gone to the banking system anyway, but it would have taken a tour through the populace first, which arguably might have had a different impact on demand if that is what you were targeting. Not that I am promoting that would have been a good idea either, I am just saying it was perplexing what they chose to do and more perplexing now that it is provably not working. All I hear so far are strains of doing it bigger and better this time. Are you seeing different strains out there?
Alasdair Macleod: I think you have summed it up right. There is this sort of extraordinary situation where for the amount of money they throw at the problem, you’d think if they had just distributed it around the citizens, it would be a far cheaper solution. I think there are two things that mitigate against that, one is if you just distribute money around the citizens, then prices go up accordingly for everything very, very rapidly.
In other words, it would be instantly inflationary. You distribute it through the banks, then what you are doing is you are doing something that you learned in university as you read Keynes, was the sort of thing to do to try to rescue an economy from further deterioration. They are all just actually working off the textbook. If you talk to any central banker about what his worst nightmare is, and he will tell you it is the debt deflationary collapsing spiral. That is… we are so close to that, they will tell you. That is our nightmare and we will ensure… do everything we possibly can to ensure that doesn’t happen. That is why they chuck the money at the economy through the banks, because they are worried about assets and I am sure that is a lot to do with why interest rates are where they are is to keep assets from falling over and therefore the bank’s balance sheets from falling over.
That’s the way they do it. It is a combination I think of if you just distribute it through people, rather gave everybody… helicoptered some money at people, and then the inflationary consequences will be certain. If you go through the banks, you sort of hope that you have got a theoretical solution. Which, incidentally as I think you are aware, I believe is no solution at all? The real problem is that we have built up such mal-investments over the years that the whole system is really falling over. It can’t take it anymore and it is time there was a debt reconciliation. That’s the end of the Keynesian experiment, that’s the trouble.
Chris Martenson: Right, so as we look forward… I follow a variety of things, what do you think people should be following if they are interested in getting an early read on whether something is developing or breaking or shifting in the story? Are we watching sovereign bond yields? Are we watching credit spreads? Are we parsing the language of the output from the next ECB meetings? What is it that really bears watching here?
Alasdair Macleod: I think the clearest indication is yield spreads because that is what the market it trying to discount. I would also say that in a bear market, which is really what rising yields are, you tend to have investors being positive and yielding to the bad news. In other words, the ability of the market to discount bad news is considerably less than a good market anticipating good news. A bear market is always open to nasty surprises. A bull market always discounts the good. If you think in bear market terms, then the yields of today that we see aren’t really discounting anything coming up. As you see those yields rise, that will give you a very, very good barometer of what is actually going on in the totality of the mess. That to me would be the thing to follow.
Chris Martenson: Well and unfortunately that signal has been somewhat degraded in its utility by all the official intervention, the non-economic layers, the central banks stepping in and depressing the yields below what the markets would be delivering. I share with you the idea that if the markets were able to decide on their own, what appropriate yields would be, they would be a lot higher than they currently are.
Alasdair Macleod: Chris, sorry if I could interject just a second. My comment really in this was with respect to the European yield situation.
Chris Martenson: Well, there too, hasn’t the ECB sort of stepped into a variety of Italian/Spanish auctions over time and through its LTRO didn’t it, wink, wink, say we wouldn’t be too upset if you took those funds and parked them in your sovereign debt. Isn’t that a lot of what happened in Spain, for instance?
Alasdair Macleod: Yes, that is certainly true. We saw the yields for these governments, government bonds fall very substantially on the last LTRO and there was no doubt the Italian and the Spanish banks and all the rest of it, whether they gave into pressure from their governments, or whether they did it willingly, I think is of no consequence. The fact is that they did it because yields went down. That is now no longer the situation. Those banks do have money, I guess, on deposit still at the ECB.
They are going to need them for their own debt maturities because those aren’t going to get rolled easily. They also have to have a certain amount of safety net there because the deposits are tending to walk out the door. The banks are now getting very, very limited on this, which should push yields up even more, I would have thought for their respective governments. We should see these yields rise in Spain and Italy. Greece I think we treat as a special case now, but of course, there is also Portugal and Ireland too, which has rather gone very, very quiet. It is gone quiet there because they are out of the headlines.
Chris Martenson: Right, where do we go from here do you think? Is this just the situation where we watch the yields? Is there a magic point beyond which the situation breaks for Spain? They go Greek in essence and we watch things unfold very rapidly?
Alasdair Macleod: I think the markets tell us. If yields go up over seven percent then it is curtains. If that is right or not, I honestly don’t know. If the market thinks it, then this is going to be important because everybody is going to watch that. I think it is only a matter of time probably a very short time, before we see yields reach the seven percent level. My view is also that one of the more dangerous situations is France itself. I am not surprised that the socialist has been elected, a socialist who incidentally is very much part of the establishment, so the compromises that Hollande is going to obtain from Germany and all the rest of it, will be I suppose broadly acceptable in the context of where we are in Europe. I think it will probably be taken generally quite badly by the market. France is a mess. They have outstanding debt of about I suppose one point three trillion Euros, something like that. Their debt GDP is around about eighty-five, ninety percent going on a hundred quite rapidly. That is a very liquid and nasty situation. Unemployment is running close to ten percent.
It is almost impossible to employ anyone in France because the taxes are so high. Do you know the total tax that you pay as an employer, more than doubles the salary that you pay an individual. This is absolute craziness, but it is been like that in France forever and a day. The result is an awful lot of the market is black market. It is quite hard to find any area in Europe, which is free from this mess. Germany is okay, they are all right in a sense. Their economy is performing reasonably well, but it is not performing well because they are doing well for Europe, they are doing well because they are selling the most cars, machine tools and everything else to China, to Brazil, to Russia. Africa’s a great growth area. Europe, as far as Germany is concerned is dead. Which of course brings us on another question; that is why should Germany continue to support all these bust Europeans?
There is a sort of conscience if you like about the last two world wars, but there is going to come a point where that wears pretty thin I would have thought. The trouble is that it is all very well, everyone turning around and saying, Germany has to help. Actually, what they are saying is that Germany’s citizens should give up their savings, their hard won savings to rescue a project, which is obviously dead or deceased. I think Germany really should bust out as soon as possible and I am sure that there are an increasing number of businessmen and bankers in Germany who are beginning to feel that way.
Chris Martenson: I agree and from my view, I think that the difficulty here is that nobody quite knows how to go about doing this. Politically, obviously it is a hairball. Just from a financial system standpoint, it is quite tricky. Even if you say all right, here’s how we start to cleave these things apart; what we have learned through watching Warren Buffet attempt to unravel the derivatives positions of a single company; or noting that they are still I think somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred thousand derivative contracts still parked around. They are trying to figure out how to undo them from the Lehman collapse.
These things just take time. It is not as simple as it used to be. It is very interconnected, so the idea here is it might be fashionable to say let’s just isolate these things. Let’s go back to some sort of Chinese firewall between these different entities, but that’s a very, very difficult prospect. Again, I see the political reality of this as requiring time, patience, care and I see the events accelerating and going faster as you might expect on the tail end of a forty-year exponentially growing debt bubble.Those two things are just sort of in c