Do Shareholder Payouts Fund Investment at New Firms?

Are shareholder payouts a tool for reallocating capital from large, established corporations to the newer, smaller firms with better prospects for growth? If so, we should see this reflected in the investment figures — the shareholder revolution of the 1980s, and the more recent growth of activist investors, should be associated with a shift of investment away from big incumbent firms. Do we see this?

As a simple test, we can look at the share of corporate investment accounted for by smaller and younger firms. And the answer this exercise suggests is, No. Within the corporate sector, there is also no sign of capital being allocated to new sectors and smaller firms. The  following  figures  show  the  share  of  total  corporate investment  accounted  for  by  young  firms,  defined  as those listed for less than five years; and by small firms, defined  as those with sales below the median sales for listed corporations in that year. [1]

youngsharesmallshare

The share of investment accounted for newer firms fluctuates between 5 and 20 percent of the total, peaking periodically when large numbers of new firms enter the markets. [2] The most recent such peak came in tech boom period of the late 1990s, as one might expect.  But the young-firm investment share shows no upward trend, and since the recession has been stuck at its lowest level of the postwar period.  As for the the share of investment accounted for small firms, it has steadily declined since the 1950s — apart from, again, a temporary spike during the tech-boom period. Like the investment share of newer firms, the investment share of small firms is now at its lowest level ever.

We come to a similar conclusion if we look at the share of investment accounted for by noncorporate businesses. Partnerships, sole proprietorships and other noncorporate businesses accounted for close to 20 percent of US fixed investment in the 1960s and 1970s, but have accounted for a steady 12 percent of fixed investment over the past 25 years. So the funds flowing out of large corporations sector are not financing increased investment in smaller, younger corporations, or in the noncorporate sector either.

noncorporateshare

 

This is not really surprising. Smaller and younger businesses are mainly dependent on bank loans, and shareholder payouts don’t increase bank lending capacity in any direct way. More broadly, it’s hard to see evidence that potential funders of new businesses are liquidity-constrained. Higher payouts presumably do contribute to higher stock prices, and perhaps marginally to lower bond yields, but any connection with financing for new businesses seems tenuous at best.

In any case, whatever the shareholder revolution has accomplished, there does no seem to have been any reallocation of capital to smaller, growing firms. Capital accumulation in the United States is more concentrated in large established corporations than ever.

 

[1] Data is from Compustat, a database that assembles all the income, cashflow and balance sheet statements published since 1950 by corporations listed on US markets. I’ve excluded the financial sector, defined as 2-digit NAICS 52 and 53 and SIC 60-69. Investment is capital expenditure plus R&D.

[2] I suspect the late-80s peak is an artifact of the many changes of ownership in that period, which are hard to distinguish from new listings.

Do Shareholder Payouts “Allocate Capital”?

With my colleagues at the Roosevelt Institute, I’m working on a long-delayed followup to the Disgorge the Cash paper.

One of the issues we are addressing is this: Aren’t higher shareholder payouts just a way of channeling funds from mature, slow-growing firms to fast-growing sectors that need capital? This has always been one of the main arguments in support of the shareholder revolution. Michael Jensen:

With all its vast increases in data, talent, and technology, Wall Street can allocate capital among competing businesses and monitor and discipline management more effectively than the CEO and headquarters staff of the typical diversified company. KKR’s New York offices and Irwin Jacobs’ Minneapolis base are direct substitutes for corporate headquarters in Akron and Peoria.

Can the data shed light on the claim that high shareholder payouts are just a way that capital markets reallocate scarce funds from stagnant established firms to up-and-coming innovators?

One line of evidence against this claim is presented in my original Disgorge paper, though not explained as clearly as it could have been. As the table below — reproduced from the paper — shows, the correlations of investment with profits and borrowing have weakened not just at the level of the individual firm, but for the corporate sector as a whole. If markets were mainly reallocating capital from the industries of yesterday to the industries of tomorrow, we would expect an inflow of funds into the corporate sector to be associated with a rise in investment somewhere, even if not in the firms that initially received them. But this is not the case — or at least, it is less the case than it used to be. The weakening of the aggregate relationship between cashflow from operations and borrowing, on the one hand, and investment, on the other, suggests that higher payouts from one business are not translated into more investment funding for another.

agg_regressions

Now I want to present two more lines of evidence that point in the same direction.

First, we can compare sources and uses of funds for corporations in general with the same sources and uses for corporations in high-technology industries. Second, we can look at smaller and younger firms specifically, and ask if they account for a higher share of investment than in the old days of managerialism, when investment was more internally financed. In the next two posts that’s what I’ll do.

Draghi Makes His Case

A few unorganized thoughts on yesterday’s press conference. Video is here. Transcript is … do they even publish transcripts of these things?

Draghi’s introductory remarks didn’t mention Greece but of course that’s what all the questions were about. The big question were about liquidity assistance (ELA) to Greek banks and under what conditions Greek debt would be included in quantitative easing, a big expansion of which was just announced.

There’s no way to hide the hypocrisy of the simultaneous expansion of QE and continued limits on ELA. You can say, the markets don’t want to hold this debt so we need to reduce our holdings too, to avoid excessive risk — then you are acting like a private bank. Or you can say, the markets don’t want to hold this debt so we need to increase our holdings, to keep its yield down — then you are acting like a central bank. But there’s no basis for applying one of these logics to Greece and the other to the rest of the euro area.

There was also no explanation for the decision to raise the ELA cap by 900 million. Draghi kept repeating the formula “solvent banks with adequate collateral” but obviously this implies a bank by bank assessment, not a hard cap for the country as a whole. Anyway, the logic of a lender of last resort is that, if you are going to support the banks, you need to be prepared to lend as much as it takes. A limited program only makes the problem worse, by encouraging depositors and other holders of short-term liabilities to get out before its exhausted. Paul de Grauwe has the right analysis here:

The correct announcement of the ECB should be that it will provide all the necessary liquidity to the Greek banks. Such an announcement will pacify depositors. Knowing that the banks have sufficient cash to pay them out they will stop running to the bank. Like the OMT, such an announcement will stop the banking crisis without the ECB actually having to provide much liquidity to the Greek banks.

These are first principles of how a central bank should deal with a banking crisis. I would be very surprised if the very intelligent men (and one woman) in Frankfurt did not know these first principles. This leads me to conclude that the ECB has other objectives than stabilizing the Greek banking system. These objectives are political. The ECB continues to put pressure on the Greek government to behave well. The price of this behavior by the ECB is paid by millions of Greeks.

Logically, ELA should either be ended or else provided on the a sufficient scale to restore confidence and end the run. Draghi suggested that there was something moderate and “proportional” about choosing a course in between, but this is incoherent. I was also very struck that he felt the need to reject the accusation that “there was bank run deliberately caused by the ECB,” which no one there had made. Remember that old line, attributed to Claud Cockburn: Never believe something until it’s been officially denied.

Another thing I found interesting was how much he treated the Bank of Greece as an independent actor, frequently referring to decisions “taken by the ECB and the Bank of Greece” and even trying to pass the buck to them on questions like whether the additional ELA was sufficient (“we have fully accommodated the Bank of Greece’s request”) and when the Greek banks would be able to reopen. Establishing that the national central banks have independent authority will be important if they become a terrain of struggle in future conflicts between popular governments and the euro authorities.

On the question of when the Greek banks would reopen, after deferring to the BoG, he then said that they hold all this government paper (which isn’t actually true — the ECB’s own numbers show that Greek banks have the lowest proportion of government loans on their books of any major euro-area country) and their solvency and the adequacy of their collateral therefore depend on what’s going on with the government. “The quality of the collateral depends on the quality of the discussions” with the creditors was one way he put it, a more or less explicit acknowledgement that this decision is being made on political criteria.

Someone asked him point-blank how the Greek banks could be ineligible for assistance when the ECB’s own analysis had concluded they were solvent; someone else asked why a hard cap was being announced when this was never done for individual banks, precisely because of concerns wit would intensify a panic. At this point (around 40:00 in the video) he changed tack again. Now he said that this was a special case because it wasn’t about conditions at individual banks but about a “systemic” problem of a whole banking system, so the old rules didn’t apply. Which of course made nonsense of the “solvency and adequate collateral” formula, without doing anything to justify the ECB’s actions.

On the question of whether or when Greek bonds would be included in QE, Draghi’s initial non-answer was “when they become eligible for monetary policy.” Pressed by the reporter (around 56:00), he turned to vice-president Constâncio, who explained that if a country’s bonds were rated below investment-grade, they could only be purchased by the ECB if (1) there was an IMF program in place and (2) the ECB’s Governing Council determines that there is “credible compliance” with the program. [1] Here again we see how monetary policy is used to advance a particular policy agenda, and more broadly, a nice illustration of how market and state power articulate. The supposed judgement of the markets is actually enforced by public agencies.

One of the few departures from Greece was when Draghi got going — I can’t remember in response to what — about the need for deeper “capital market integration.” Which seems nuts. Who, looking at the situation in Europe today, would say, You know what we really need? More uncontrolled international lending. It’s just like Dani Rodrik’s parable:

Imagine landing on a planet that runs on widgets. You are told that international trade in widgets is highly unpredictable and volatile on this planet, for reasons that are poorly understood. A small number of nations have access to imported widgets, while many others are completely shut out even when they impose no apparent obstacles to trade. With some regularity, those countries that have access to widgets get too much of a good thing, and their markets are flooded with imported widgets. This allows them to go on a widget binge, which makes everyone pretty happy for a while. However, such binges are often interrupted by a sudden cutoff in supply, unrelated to any change in circumstances. The turnaround causes the affected economies to experience painful economic adjustments. For reasons equally poorly understood, when one country is hit by a supply cutback in this fashion, many other countries experience similar shocks in quick succession. Some years thereafter, a widget boom starts anew.

Your hosts beg you for guidance: how should they deal with their widget problem? Ponder this question for a while and then ponder under what circumstances your central recommendation would be that all extant controls on international trade in widgets be eliminated.

 

[1] I’m not sure but I believe these standards were established by the ECB itself, and not by any of its governing legislation. So the answer is evasive in another way. In general, watching these things makes clear how helpful it is in resisting popular pressure to have multiple, shifting, overlapping authorities. Any decision can be presented as an objective constraint imposed from somewhere else.

 

UPDATE: Nathan Tankus has some very sharp observations on the press conference.

 

New Article in the Review of Keynesian Economics

My paper with Arjun Jayadev, “The Post-1980 Debt Disinflation: An Exercise in Historical Accounting,” has now been published in the Review of Keynesian Economics. (There is some other stuff that looks interesting in there as well, but unfortunately most of the content is paywalled, a choice I’ve complained to the editors about.) I’ve posted the full article on the articles page on this site.

Here’s the abstract:

The conventional division of household payment flows between consumption and saving is not suitable for investigating either the causes of changing household debt–income ratios, or the interaction of household debt with aggregate demand. To explain changes in household debt, it is necessary to use an accounting framework that isolates net credit-market flows to the household sector, and that takes account of changes in the debt–income ratio resulting from nominal income growth as well as from new borrowing. To understand the implications of changing household income and expenditure flows for aggregate demand, it is necessary to distinguish expenditures that contribute to demand from expenditures that do not. Applying a conceptually appropriate accounting framework to the historical data reveals that the rise in household leverage over the past 3 decades cannot be understood in terms of increased household borrowing. For both the decade of the 1980s and the full post-1980 period, rising household debt–income ratios are entirely explained by the rise in nominal interest rates relative to nominal income growth. The rise in household debt after 1980 is best thought of as a debt disinflation, analogous to the debt deflation of the 1930s.

You can read the rest here.

Lessons from the Greek Crisis

The deal, obviously it looks bad. No sense in spinning: It’s unconditional surrender. It is bad.

There’s no shortage of writing about how we got here. I do think that we — in the US and elsewhere — should resist the urge to criticize the Syriza government, even for what may seem, to us, like obvious mistakes. The difficulty of taking a position in opposition to “Europe” should not be underestimated. It’s one of the ironies of history that the prestige of social democracy, earned through genuine victories by and for working people, is now one of the most powerful weapons in the hands of those who would destroy it. For a sense of the constraints the Syriza government has operated under, I particularly recommend this interview with an unnamed senior advisor to Syriza, and this interview with Varoufakis.

Personally I don’t think I can be a useful contributor to the debate about Syriza’s strategy. I think those of us in the US should show solidarity with Greece but refrain from second-guessing the choices made by the government there. But we can try to better understand the situation, in support of those working to change it. So, 13 theses on the Greek crisis and the crisis next time.

These points are meant as starting points for further discussion.  I will try to write about each of them in more detail, as I have time.

Continue reading Lessons from the Greek Crisis

Greece Thoughts and Links

Like everyone sympathetic to Greece in the current crisis, I was pleased by the size of the “No” vote in last weekend’s referendum. Even taking into account support from the far right, the 62% for No represents a significant increase in support from the 36% of the vote SYRIZA got in January.

But, I’m not sure how the vote changes the situation in any substantive way. Certainly it hasn’t led to any softening of the creditors’ position. The situation remains what it was before: Greece must comply with the full list of policy changes demanded by the creditors, and any further changes demanded in the future, or else the central bank will keep the Greek banking system shut down. The debt itself is just a pretext on both sides — repayment is not really what the creditors want, and default isn’t really what they are threatening.

I continue to think that the Bank of Greece is the key strategic terrain in this contest. If the elected government can regain control of the central bank — in defiance of eurosystem norms if need be — then it removes the source of the creditors’ power over the Greek economy. There is no need for a new currency in this scenario. If the Bank of Greece simply goes back to performing the usual functions of a central bank, instead of engaging in what is, in effect, a politically-motivated strike, then Greek banks can reopen and the Greek government can finance needed spending without the consent of the official creditors.

More broadly, I think we cannot understand the economics of the situation unless we clearly understand that “money,” in modern economies, refers to a network of promises between banks and not a set of tokens. In this sense, I don’t think it makes sense to think of being in or out of a currency as a simple binary. As Perry Mehrling emphasizes, there have always been overlapping networks of money-contracts, with various economic units participating in multiple networks to different degrees.

Here are a few relevant links, some spelling out my thoughts more, some useful background material.

 

1. Here is an interview with me on the podcast RadioDispatch. If you don’t mind listening rather than reading, this is my fullest attempt to explain the logic of the crisis.

RadioDispatch interview June 2015

 

2. I had a productive discussion with Dan Davies on this Crooked Timber thread. Since my last comment there got stuck in moderation for some reason, I’m reposting it here:

From my point of view, the key question is whether the ECB is constrained by, or at least acting in accordance with, the normal principles of central banking, or if it is deliberately withholding support from the Greek banking system in order to advance a political agenda.

Obviously, I think it’s the second. (And I think this is really the only leverage the creditors have — there is no reason that a default in itself should be particularly costly to Greece.) On whether it is plausible that the ECB would (ab)use its authority this way, I think that is unequivocally demonstrated by the letters sent to the governments of ItalySpain and Ireland during those countries’ sovereign debt crises in 2011. In return for support of those countries’ sovereign debt markets, the ECB demanded a long list of unrelated reforms, mainly focused on labor-market liberalization. There is no credible case that many of these reforms (for instance banning cost-of-living clauses in private employment contracts) were connected with the immediate crisis or even with public budgets at all. I think it can be taken as proven that the EC has, in the past, deliberately refused to perform its function of stabilizing the financial system, in order to put pressure on elected governments.

We can debate how exactly this precedent fits Greece. But I don’t think a central bank that allows its country’s banking system to collapse can ever be said to be doing its job. Every modern central bank — including the ECB with respect to every euro-area country except Greece — will go to heroic lengths, bending or ignoring rules as need be, to keep the payments system operating.

 

3. Over at The Week, I talk with Jeff Spross about the idea that changes in private financial flows between euro-area countries can be passively offset by balances between the national central banks in the TARGET2 system, avoiding the need to mangle the real economy to produce rapid adjustment of trade flows.

Like many critics of the euro system, I used to think that they had succeeded in creating something like a modern gold standard, and that the only way crises could be avoided was with a fiscal union, so that public flows could offset shifts in financial flows. But I no longer think this is correct, I think that the TARGET2 system can, and has, offset changes in private financial flows without the need for any fiscal payments.

(The Week also had a nice writeup of the Reagan-debt post.)

 

4. I reached this conclusion after reading several pieces by Philippine Cour-Thimann, who is the source for understanding TARGET2 and its role both in the normal operations of the euro system and in the crisis. I recommend this one to start with. (Incidentally it was my friend Enno Schröder who told me about Cour-Thimann.)

 

5. One topic I’ve wanted to get into more is the (in my view) limited capacity of relative-price adjustments to balance trade even when exchange rates are flexible. In the past, I’ve made this argument on the crude empirical grounds that Greece had large trade deficits continuously for decades before it joined the euro. I’ve also pointed out Enno’s work showing that the growth of European trade imbalances owes nothing to expenditure switching toward German products and away from Greek, Spanish, etc., but is entirely explained by the more rapid income growth in the latter countries. Now here is another interesting piece of evidence on this question from the ECB, a big new study finding that while there is a substantial fall in exports in response to large appreciations, there is no discernible growth in exports in response to depreciations. This fits with the idea, which I attribute to Robert Blecker, that in a world where prices are mainly set in destination markets rather than by producer costs, changes in exchange rates show up in exporter profit margins rather than directly in sales volumes. And while large losses will certainly cause some exporting firms to exit or fail, large (potential) profits are only one of a number of conditions required for exporters to grow, let alone for the creation of new exporting industries.

 

6. This is a great post by Steve Randy Waldman.

 

7. Here’s an interesting find from a friend: In the 1980s, Fidel Castro proposed “a cartel of debtor nations” that would require their creditors to negotiate with them as a group. See pages 278-285 of this anthology.

 

UPDATE: Re item 2, here’s Martin Wolf today (his links):

The European Central Bank could expand its emergency lending to the Greek banking system. If the ECB were a normal central bank that is exactly what it would do. Greece has a run on its banks. As the lender of last resort, the central bank ought to lend into such a run. If the ECB believes the banks are solvent, it must lend. If the ECB believes the banks are insolvent, it should arrange recapitalisation — by converting non-insured liabilities into equity, by selling banks to new owners or by securing funding from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Unfortunately, the ECB is not a normal central bank…

What Greece Must Do

Greece doesn’t need a new currency, it needs control over its central bank.

The Greek crisis is not fundamentally about Greek government debt. Nor in its current acute current form, is it about the balance of payments between Greece and the rest of the world. Rather, it is about the Greek banking system, and the withdrawal of support for it by the central bank. The solution accordingly is for Greece to regain control of its central bank.

I can’t properly establish the premise here. Suffice to say:

(1) On the one hand, the direct economic consequences of default are probably nil. (Recall that Greece in some sense already defaulted, less than five years ago.) Even if default resulted in a complete loss of access to foreign credit, Greece today has neither a trade deficit nor a primary fiscal deficit to be financed. And with respect to the fiscal deficit, if the Greek central bank behaved like central banks in other developed countries, financing a deficit domestically would not be a problem. And with respect to the external balance, the evidence, both historical and contemporary, suggests that financial markets do not in fact punish defaulters. (And why should they? — the extinction of unserviceable debt almost by definition makes a government a better credit risk post-default, and capitalists are no more capable of putting principle ahead of profit in this case than in others). The costs of default, rather, are the punishment imposed by the creditors, in this case by the ECB. The actual cost of default is being paid already — in the form of shuttered Greek banks, the result of the refusal of the Bank of Greece to extend them the liquidity they need to honor depositors’ withdrawal requests. [1]

(2) On the other hand, Greece’s dependence on its official creditors is not, as most people imagine, simply the result of an unwillingness of the private sector to hold Greek government debt, but also of the ECB’s decision to forbid — on what authority, I don’t know — the Greek government from issuing more short-term debt. [2] This although Greek T-bills, held in large part by the private sector, currently carry interest rates between 2 and 3 percent — half what Greece is being charged by the ECB. And of course, it’s not so many years since other European countries were facing fiscal crises — in 2011-2012 rates on Portugal’s sovereign debt hit 14 percent, Ireland’s 12, and Spain and Italy were over 7 percent and headed upwards. At these rates these countries’ debt ratios — not much lower than Greece’s — would have ballooned out of control and they also would have faced default. Why didn’t that happen? Not because of fiscal surpluses, delivered through brutal austerity — fiscal adjustments in those countries were all much milder than in Greece. Rather, because the ECB intervened to support their sovereign debt markets, and announced an open-ended willingness to do “whatever it takes” to preserve their ability to borrow within the euro system. This public commitment was sufficient to convince private investors to hold these countries’ debt, at rates not much above Germany’s. Needless to say, no similar commitment has been made for Greek sovereign debt. Quite the opposite.

So to both questions — why is failure to reach agreement with its official creditors so devastating for Greece; and why is the Greek government in hock to those creditors in the first place? — the answer is, the policies of the central bank. And specifically its refusal to fulfill the normally overriding duties of a central bank, stabilization of the banking system and of the market for government debt, a refusal in the service of a political agenda. The problem so posed, the solution is clear: Greece must regain control of its central bank.

Now, most people assume this means it must leave the euro and (re)introduce its own currency. I don’t think this is necessarily the case. It’s not widely realized, but the old national central banks did not cease to exist when the euro was created. [1] In fact, not only do they continue to operate, they perform almost all the day to day operation of central banking in the euro area, with, on paper, a substantial degree of autonomy from the central authorities in Brussels. So what’s required is not “exit,” not a radical step by the Greek government. Rather simply a change in personnel at the Bank of Greece. The BoG only needs to halt what is in effect a politically motivated strike, and return to performing the usual functions of a central bank.

Now, I cannot exclude the possibility that if Greece takes steps to neutralize the creditors’ main weapon, they will retaliate in other ways, which will result in the eventual exit of Greece from the euro. (Though “exit” is not as black and white as people suppose. [2]) But this would be a political choice by the creditors, not in any way a result of economic logic. We should not speak of exit in that case, but embargo.

Here is my proposal:

 

1. The Greek government takes control of the Bank of Greece. It replaces the BoG’s current leadership — holdovers from the old conservative government, appointed at the 11th hour when Syriza was on the brink of power — with suitably qualified people who support the program of Greece’s elected government. The argument is made that the central bank has abused its mandate, and failed in its fundamental duty to maintain the integrity of the banking system, in order to advance a political agenda.

Either legislation could be passed explicitly subordinating the BoG to the elected government, or use could be made of existing provisions for removal of central bank officials for cause. The latter may not be feasible and we don’t want to get bogged down in formalities. Central bankers have critical public function and if they won’t do it, they must be replaced with others who will. Whatever the law may say.

 

2. The new Bank of Greece leadership commit publicly to maintain the integrity of the Greek payments system, to protect deposits in Greek banks and to prevent bank runs — the same commitment the ECB has repeatedly made for banks elsewhere in Europe. The Greek government asserts its rights to license banks and resolve bank failures. Capital controls are imposed. Greek banks reopen.

 

3. If necessary, the BoG resumes Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) or equivalent loans to Greek banks. While the promise to do this is important, it probably won’t be necessary to actually resume ELA on any significant scale because:

– removing the previous threats to withdraw support from Greek banks will end the bank run and probably lead to the voluntary return of deposits to Greek banks.

– capital controls and, if necessary, continued limits on cash withdrawals, block any channels for deposits to leave the Greek banking system.

– resumption of Greek payments to public employees, pensioners, etc., to be soon followed by resumed economic growth, will automatically increase the deposit base of Greek banks.

 

4. The Greek government resumes spending at a level consistent with domestic needs, including full pay for civil servants, full payment of pensions, etc. Taxes similarly are set according to macroeconomic and distribution objectives. The resulting fiscal deficit is funded by issue of new debt to domestic purchasers. This new debt will be senior to existing debt to the public creditors.

It may be that this debt will end up being held by the banks, but that is no big deal. Greek government debt currently accounts for less than 6 percent of the assets of Greek banks, the lowest of many major European country and barely half the euro-area average. And in the absence of capital flight, bank assets and deposits will increase in line, so there is no need for any additional financing from the Bank of Greece. Even more: If resolution of the crisis leads to a repatriation of Greek savings abroad, then the increase in deposit liabilities of Greek banks will be balanced by increased reserves at (or rather reduced liabilities to) the Bank of Greece. The BoG in turn will acquire a more positive Target balance, or if it’s ejected from Target (see below), an equivalent increase in foreign exchange holdings.

 

5. The interest rate on the new debt needs to be comfortably less than the expected nominal growth rate of the Greek economy. I see no reason why this will not be true of market rates — there are already private holders of Greek T-bills with yields between 2 and 3 percent, and the combination of a Greek central bank committed to stabilizing the market for Greek public debt, and capital controls preventing Greek banks and wealth holders from acquiring foreign assets, should tend to push rates down from current levels. But if necessary, the Greek central bank will have sufficient hard and soft tools to get Greek banks to hold the new debt at acceptable rates.

 

6. The official creditors are offered a take-it-or-leave-it swap of existing loans for new debt. (I think this kind of forced restructuring is preferable to outright repudiation for various reasons.) The new debt will have a combination of writedown of face value of the current debt, maturity extensions and reduced interest rates so as to keep annual payments at some reasonable level. I think it might be better to avoid an explicit reduction of face value and simply offer, let’s say, 30 year bonds paying 2%, of equal face value to the current debt. It would be best if the new bonds were “Greek-denominated.” Perhaps it’s sufficient to say that the new bonds are issued under Greek law.

 

7. The Greek government must be prepared for declarations from the creditors that its actions are illegal, and for possible retaliation. Rhetorically, it may be helpful to emphasize that Greece remains sovereign and Greek law continues to control the Greek central bank and private banks; that the ECB (and its agents at the Bank of Greece) have abused their authority to advance a political agenda; and that the wellbeing of the Greek people must take priority over treaty obligations. But framing may not make much difference here and anyway these kinds of tactical-political questions are for the Syriza leadership and not for an American sympathizer.

What concrete form will creditor retaliation take? One possibility is they will stop deposits in Greek banks from being used to make payments elsewhere in Europe, by shutting off Bank of Greece access to Target2, the settlement system that currently clears balances between national central banks within the eurosystem. [3] Concretely, lack of access to Target2 needn’t be crippling. Payments within Greece won’t be affected, domestic interbank settlement can use accounts at the Bank of Greece just the same as now. Foreign payments will be made using deposits at banks in the exporting country, just as trade payments outside the euro area are already made. Since Greece currently has a small trade surplus, there is no need for anyone outside of Greece to accept a Greek bank deposit in payment. And even if foreign borrowing is desired, the resulting funds can take the form of deposits at a bank in the lending country — again, just as already happens for loan transactions outside the euro area. In effect, by cutting off Target2 the ECB will just be helping Greece enforce its capital controls.

Now one potential issue is the foreign obligations of private Greek units. Can they be paid with deposits in Greek banks? Let’s be clear that a negative answer requires a change in the law by the other euro countries — they are the ones that will redenominate, not Greece. But to be safe, Greece should pass a law clarifying that euro-denominated deposits at Greek banks are legal tender for all existing payment obligations by Greek households or businesses. And it would be good to have a sense of the scale of such obligations.

Assuming Greece loses access to Target2, its export earnings, going forward, will take the form of deposits in non-Greek banks or equivalent claims on non-Greek financial institutions. Which leads to…

 

8. It is critical to ensure that Greek export earnings are available to finance Greek imports. Many discussions of Greek default focus on what are, to my mind, non- or minor problems, while ignoring this major one. [4] If payment for Greek exports takes the form of deposits in foreign banks, as will presumably be the case of Target2 access is shut off, steps must be taken to ensure that those deposits are available for import payments rather being used to finance private acquisition of foreign assets.

Given Greece’s overall near-zero trade balance, access to foreign loans should not be necessary to finance continued imports. But this assumes that export earnings are available to finance imports. There is a danger that exporters will seek to evade capital controls by holding export earnings abroad, manipulating invoices if necessary to disguise noncompliance with the law. This is a serious problem in subsaharan Africa and elsewhere — individuals involved in foreign trade overstate the value of imports and understate the value of exports in order to retain foreign earnings abroad for their personal use. This kind of capital flight can leave a country that notionally has a positive trade balance nonetheless dependent on foreign borrowing to finance its imports. (Ireland is a recent example within the euro area.) The Greek government needs to have enforcement mechanisms to ensure that export earnings are used to finance imports and not to accumulate foreign assets. This should be straightforward where foreign sales are easily visible to regulators, as in tourism or refining, but may be challenging in the case of shipping.

Other European countries will presumably not be cooperative with Greece’s efforts to enforce capital controls. This is a reality that has to be planned for, but it also should be called what it is: Collusion with criminals to steal goods and services from Greece.

 

9. The government may need to ration foreign exchange. If capital controls are ineffective, or, in the first year or two, if seasonal variation in Greek exports swamps the overall balance, Greek export earnings may be insufficient to pay for current imports for some period, and foreign credit may not be available. This need not be a crisis. But it does mean that the government should be prepared to allocate scarce foreign exchange to particular sectors. The mechanisms to do this are already implicit in the imposition of capital controls. And the centralized allocation of foreign exchange is consistent with….

 

10. In the long run Greece should learn from the model of Korea and similar late industrializers. (This, also, is the argument for nationalizing the banks, rather than the fact that the “true” value of their assets, in some sense, leaves them insolvent.) Little if any boost to Greece’s net exports should be expected from devaluation. The goal rather must be to channel savings and foreign exchange to sectors that are not currently competitive, but that plausibly might become so.  Centralized allocation of credit and foreign exchange is needed to transform the industrial structure, rather than passively following current comparative advantage.

 

[1]  Those requests themselves are largely the result of the hysterical fear-mongering by the BoG and its masters in Greece, the exact opposite of the normal efforts of central bankers to prevent panics. In any case, the rules of the eurosystem give the ECB/BoG almost unlimited discretion with respect to liquidity assistance, so they can’t claim this decision is forced on them.

[2] You can think of a continuum from current membership, to the situation of Cyprus with capital controls, to Andorra which prints its own euro currency but does not have shares in the ECB, to Montenegro which uses the euros as domestic currency without any formal participation, to Denmark which has its own currency but clears balances with euro-area central banks through a Target2 account at the ECB.

[3] The best discussions of Target2 I know of are by Philippine Cour-Thimann.

[4] Here as so often, the political authorities step in to do what “market forces” supposedly ought to be doing but aren’t.

[5] Don’t believe the stories you will hear that this is somehow a necessary or automatic reaction to replacement of BoG leadership. It is not. Countries that are not in the euro at all are still permitted to participate in Target2.

[6] When I was debating this stuff with the very smart Nathan Tankus a few days ago, he brought up the possibility that foreign ATM cards wouldn’t work in Greece, and of an adverse ruling from the European Court of Justice. Oh no!

Senior German Official: No Deal as Long as Syriza “Communists” in Office

From The Times, via The Australian:

Greece will not get a cent in new eurozone bailout loans while Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis remain in power, because Germany will block any such deal, one of Europe’s most influential politicians has told The Times.

“Today there is the question of do we trust Tsipras and Varoufakis? The answer is clear to all parties, no,” the senior German conservative said.

He also lifted the lid on a European Union attempt to push Mr Tsipras’s left-wing Syriza out of power regardless of the outcome of the vote on July 5.

If Greece’s prime minister and finance minister remained in office, even after a “yes” vote in Sunday’s referendum, then Athens would stand no chance of a new bailout, he indicated.

Under the rules of the European Stability Mechanism, the euro’s bailout fund, the German parliament, or Bundestag, has a veto or blocking vote over any new program such as that requested by Greece at the 11th hour.

The senior German conservative said that Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrat Union (CDU) and its Bavarian allies the Christian Social Union (CSU) would block any request made while the pair, described as “communists”, remained in power.

“In my party the CDU/CSU there would be a lot of colleagues who would vote ‘no’ if Varoufakis and Tsipras are asking. For sure. Because there is simply no trust any more. They say, I am not going to give taxpayers’ money to Greece without a reliable partner,” he said. Referring to Syriza, he added: “We need a reliable partner who wants to do the job.”

The EU’s plan is to back a “yes” vote strongly by posing it as an in/out question on membership of the euro rather than austerity measures and then, in the event of a victory, to oust Syriza after the expected resignation of Mr Tsipras.

“We will do everything to get a ‘yes’. Then we will need a new government, then we have to implement measures,” he said.

The politician revealed that the socialist Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, was involved in secret talks, possibly including Mr Tsipras — whom he sees as a moderate — to “split the Syriza movement”.

The aim was to create a “technical government” as a precondition for a new EU bailout, incorporating moderate MPs in Syriza to avoid new elections.

In the event of a “no” vote and Syriza continuing to hold the reins of power, the German conservative said, “it’s over” and Greece would have to leave the euro after defaulting on ECB loans on July 20. “We will talk about a humanitarian rescue program but not an additional [bailout],” he said.

h/t Harry Konstantinidis