por admin » Lun Sep 26, 2011 10:55 pm
A Fannie Mae por los bonos Europeos? (esa no puede ser una buena idea)
La ultima idea para evitar enfrentar la realidad de Grecia.
De todas las ideas que emergieron este fin de semana del Banco Mundial y el Fondo Monetario Internacional, la mas audaz es expandir los 440 billones de euros del actual fondo de rescate a 2 trillones de euros apalancados para comprar la deuda soberana. Llamenlo la Fannie Mae de Europa.
A Fannie Mae for Europe's Bonds?
The latest idea to avoid facing Greek facts
Of all the ideas to emerge from this weekend's meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the most audacious is to turn Europe's existing €440 billion ($594 billion) bailout fund into a €2 trillion leveraged fund for buying European sovereign debt. Call it Europe's Fannie Mae solution.
Under one version of the proposal, the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) would be converted into a licensed bank, which would then post its existing capital and sovereign bonds as collateral with the European Central Bank, and receive still more cash in return. That cash would be used to buy more debt, which would in turn be put up as collateral for more central bank loans, and so on.
The ECB could accomplish the same thing by buying bonds directly with newly minted euros, and some analysts have suggested that this is exactly what it should be doing. But that would turn the ECB into a vehicle for funding member states' budget deficits, which it is specifically barred from doing.
Instead, the alternative being suggested is to turn the EFSF into a kind of leveraged buy-up fund for government bonds. This is supposed to achieve two things: First, it could take euro-zone members out of the clutches of those fickle and rapacious private investors. And, second, it would allow the ECB to maintain a sheen of respectability, as it would merely be lending to this bank against collateral, just as it does with other banks.
Here is where the Fannie Mae likeness begins to emerge—as a government-guaranteed leverage machine for lowering the cost of a certain kind of debt. The difference with Fannie is that this proposal involves sovereign debt instead of mortgages, and the borrowing is being done directly from the central bank. Fannie at least had to market its debt to private investors.
Now imagine a scenario in which this new super-bank borrows a few trillion from the ECB to buy up government bonds—and then the bond prices go down. Given the leverage built into this euro-zone Fannie bank, it wouldn't take much in the way of interest-rate normalization to wipe out the capital underlying all the capital that this euro-Fannie would start with.
To prevent that, the ECB could, as the super-bank's main creditor, simply conspire to keep rates low enough to keep the fund in the black—but that much easy money would have to, sooner or later, show up in rising euro-zone inflation.
All of which brings us to the most important choice now confronting Europe's leaders. On one side, we have the possible default of an overspending, over-indebted, figure-fudging, small economy in Southern Europe. Like many things that have never happened before, a Greek default would have unknowable consequences. The Greek banking system would need recapitalization, and some banks elsewhere in Europe likely would as well.
But set against those uncertainties, Europe—in the name of averting Greek default—is lurching toward huge and costly policy mistakes. A leveraged, multitrillion-euro "bank," borrowing from the central bank to buy up bonds all over Europe, is not a reasonable way to avoid imposing some losses on the owners of Greek government bonds. If that's the medicine for saving Greece, a full-blown default looks better all the time.