Monday 3 October 2011

Timing a Greek default;

There are three main mechanisms that could precipitate a default;

  1. EZ and IMF pull future lending
  2. Greek banks face a domestic run on deposits
  3. Greece finally starts running a primary budget surplus and political cover allows them repudiate "odious debts".
(1) seems unlikely. Not because I believe that these institutions are committed or well organized, but because it would require action, as we have seen they clearly need a lot of prodding to do anything.

(2) would be very hard to predict as it is based on group confidence, so in modelling or thought process terms, its just a poisson process. 

(3) on the other hand *should* be easy to forecast. (well if one could have any confidence that Greek reported figures were accurate or not deliberately manipulated).

There have been several rumours that Greece has been inflating their budget deficit figures.

Their most recent projections however show that they should be running a primary budget surplus next year. In which case it makes even more sense that they promise reform programmes that kick in with savings in 2015 to secure immediate loans.

I am cynical so it is easy to speculate that Greece is deliberately trying to maximize the receipt of a fiscal transfer. What I find much more difficult to understand is the German position.

Many commentators have tried to explain their actions as 'pot committed politicians'. That it is just politicians trying to save their pride and hide the folly of their euro project designs. In reality the polls and general German media commentary actually suggests that not to be the case, that the population actually support some form of action, perhaps because they don't understand the true cost?

It appears to me that Merkel is deliberately obfuscating and is reluctant to face the consequences on ANY decision, be they supporting the euro, drawing a line in the sand, or turning their back. That is very weak.

Roland Berger published a plan which they called "Eureca". Which essentially said that Greece should take €125bn of assets (clearly overvalued for the purpose) and put them into a SPV in Luxembourg, and sell them to the EZ, use the proceeds to do a massive bond buy back. Then the SPV could be unwound, if the proceeds were lower than 125bn Greece would be liable to top it up, but would retain any upside if the assets were more.

There were some worrying features;
  1. Putting the assets in an SPV in Luxembourg really is meaningless, if Greece decided to nationalize the assets again International law would be pretty much useless, or they could apply huge tax rates to those assets and perform a defacto nationalization.
  2. Clearly this is just a secured loan, because Greece would still be liable for any shortfall, in which case unsecured creditors would still be wary on an ongoing basis of making new loans to Greece.
  3. For the assets to have real value rather than to be trophy assets, then they must have some associated cashflow, in which case the secured loan must actually have a cost, ie. If they include public offices, then clearly the SPV must be paid rent, in which case the improvement in fiscal position is a lot smaller than the headline figure.
  4. The point which was repeated several times that was most worrying however was the boast that such a plan would "burn speculators". Which they believed would cause spreads on the rest of the peripherals to collapse.
This last point just shows that they don't have a clue.