Category Archives: Greece

discounting and today’s equity market

April 21, 2015 By in Discounting, EU financial crisis, Greece, securities markets Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Discounting is the term Wall Street uses for the idea that investors factor into today’s prices, to a greater or lesser degree, their beliefs about the future (I wrote a detailed post about the process in October 2012).

 

Two of the major macroeconomic factors the market is wrestling with now are the timing and extent of the Fed’s future moves to raise interest rates from their current emergency lows, and the possibility that Greece will default on its debts and exit the euro.

 

My experience is that almost nothing is ever 100% discounted in advance.  There’s always some price movement when the event actually happens.  Having said that, the coming rise in interest rates in the US has been so anticipated–and talked about by the Fed–for such a long time that there may even be a positive market reaction to the first rise.  This would be on the idea that Wall Street would give a sigh of relief when there’s no more anticipatory tension to deal with.  More likely, there’ll be a mild negative movement, for a short period, but that’s all.

The Greek financial crisis has also been in the news for a long time.  But we don’t have the same extensive history of behavior during past economic cycles to draw on, the way we do with the Fed.  We do have Argentina as a case study in what happens to the defaulting country (personally, I expect the consequences of default for Greece would be pretty terrible for its citizens).  But the focus of investors’ concern is what damage might be done to the EU by Greece’s leaving.  In addition, lots of non-economic factors are involved in this situation.  There’s Greece’s central role in Europe’s beliefs about its own exceptionalism.  There’s the Greek portrayal of the EU’s requirement that Greece implement structural economic reform as a condition for debt relief as 21st-century Nazism.  There’s the status quo in Greece that has benefited from the country’s profligate borrowing.  There’s fear of the unknown that must be urging politicians to paper over Greece’s problems.

In addition, my sense is that the markets’ overriding emotion so far is denial–hope that the whole situation will go away.  Current thinking seems to be that the parties will arrange for some sort of default, along with capital controls to restrict the flow of euros out of Greece, that will allow Greece to stay in the EU.  Still, I find it very hard to calculate odds or even to anticipate what the worst that can happen might be, or the best.  This makes me think that very little of the possible negatives of “Grexit” are factored into today’s prices.

More tomorrow.

Grexit a 50/50 possibility…

March 24, 2015 By in economics, EU financial crisis, Greece Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

…according to financier George Soros.

Personally, I have a hard time dealing with Mr. Soros’s Donald Trump-ish nature.  In his book The Alchemy of Finance, for example, he claims to have invented the thesis-anti-thesis-synthesis explanatory pattern that was introduced to European thought by Hegel in 1807 and developed by Marx later in that century.  Hard to believe Mr. Soros, who studied philosophy, is completely unaware of either of these seminal figures.  I’ve also thought that a significant amount of the success of his Quantum Fund was due to Soros’ less well-known partner, Jim Rogers.

If there’s one thing, George Soros knows about, however, it’s currencies and politics.  So his view that it’s a flip of a coin whether Greece stays in the EU or leaves, is well worth listening to.

The short story of Greece’s woes is that after joining the EU it racked up so much sovereign debt using the implicit repayment guarantee of being in the euro (kind of like having a credit card that can’t be maxed out) that it can’t possibly pay all of it back.  The gravity of the situation came to light several years ago when a newly installed (and now gone) government announced  the previous administration had been falsifying the country’s national economic accounts  for years.

Greece has since been negotiating for debt concessions in return for ending its spendthrift ways.  Its strategy so far has been to promise reform in return for debt relief   …but to do nothing.    This tactic seems to have recently passed its “sell by” date.  The EU and the IMF now appear to believe that the moral hazard risk of continue to accommodate Greece is worse than the potential damage to the Eurozone from expelling it.

As I see it, the ball is now clearly in Athens’ court.

For what it’s worth, I think Grexit would turn out to be a genuine tragedy for Greece, but far less damaging to the euro than is commonly believed.  Rather than giving encouragement to breakaway movements in the UK, Spain and elsewhere, I think Greece outside the EU–substantial currency depreciation, loss of access to external finance–would serve as a cautionary tale instead.    Think Argentina without the farm wealth.

My guess is that the euro would decline a bit on Grexit.  The banks might have a rocky time, too.  It’s very possible, though, that the markets would be happy just to have the situation resolved–and that any fallout would be small and short in duration.

 

 

investment wildcard: Grexit

February 17, 2015 By in EU financial crisis, Greece Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

My first employer on Wall Street had an unusually aggressive negotiating style.  At one time, a big brokerage firm wanted to buy the company he founded.  They agreed on a price after lengthy negotiations.  Two weeks later, my boss reopened the negotiations and successfully raised the bid.  Then he did it again.

On the day the contracts were going to be signed, he asked for another 5%, figuring, I think, that the buyer would have no choice but to acquiesce rather than see all the time and effort it had put into the deal go up in smoke.

The buyer walked out the door instead.

According to the Japanese companies I’ve talked to over the years, Chinese government officials use the same psychological ploy–agree, let the other side relax and celebrate  …and then ask for more.  The one difference with China is that twenty years ago manufacturing there gave you both a labor cost and a capital cost advantage over making things elsewhere (the only instance of this I’ve seen in thirty years as an analyst).  So there was no question of going elsewhere.

From my casual observation, Greece has been using this same negotiating style with the rest of the EU over the past few years.  I suspect, however, that Greece’s position is closer to that of my old employer rather than China’s.

How so?

–Greece is small, representing only about 3% of the EU’s GDP.  Arguably, the most important thing it brings to the union is the cachet of once having been the cradle of democracy.

–EU financial institutions are much better able to withstand the shock of a Greek exit from the union than they were in the depths of the financial crisis.

–Greece has complied with virtually none of the dozen-plus structural reform mandates required by the current bailout, which expires at the end of this month.  This gives the EU no reason to believe that Greece will follow through on any terms it agrees to now

–allowing an unrepentant Greece to remain in the EU under far more relaxed standards than afforded to, say, Spain, could easily prove more destabilizing to the EU than cutting ties

–the negative economic consequences for Greece of Grexit could be enormous–enough to provide a cautionary example for other states, or regions within states to reconsider separatist movements.

my take

I think Greece is holding a much weaker hand than is commonly perceived.  I think that the chances Greek government negotiators will take the one step too far that will cause the other side to leave the room are significant–although I have no idea how to quantify that.  Finally, I think any negative reaction to an actual Grexit, ex Greek stocks, which I imagine would do very poorly, would be shorter and milder than the consensus thinks.

the Greek election

January 26, 2015 By in Current Market Thoughts, EU financial crisis, Greece Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Yesterday Greece held a parliamentary election.  Its result was that the sitting government was replaced by a coalition whose main platform is renegotiation of the terms of that country’s bailout agreement with its EU creditors.

The Greek argument for further restructuring is that the country has suffered enough by not having grown for a half-decade, that it has made significant structural reforms and that, at 175% of GDP, its euro-denominated sovereign debt is impossible to repay no matter what Greece does.

The other side is, more or less, that Greece deliberately deceived lenders for years by issuing falsified national accounts, so it doesn’t deserve better treatment.  (There’s a fuller discussion in my posts  about Greece from 2010.)

When I saw the election news last night, the euro had declined by about a percent from Friday’s close and S&P 500 futures were down by about 12 points.  As I’m writing this, the euro is up by more than a percent against the USD, stocks indices across Europe are rising and the S&P is down by about half what the futures in Asia were showing.

How so?

I think the markets are coming around to the view–which I think is probably correct–that the EU knows deep down that the current austerity regime is unsustainable, particularly in the current no-growth situation for the union as a whole.  Greek may well be the trigger for a more general rethink of a restrictive fiscal policy that simply hasn’t worked.

If so, this would be another reason for a harder look at beaten up EU stocks.