Why Central Banks’ Action Could Make Matters Worse

Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed the emergence of what has become known as the “European Debt Crisis.” Capital markets have become increasingly concerned over the sovereign debt of the European peripheral countries and the solvency of the financial institutions that hold much of that debt. You can tell from the 10-year borrowing rates shown in the table below exactly where the concerns reside.

Solvency issues manifest themselves in liquidity issues. Looking at the table, you can see that investors are hesitant to lend to the lower tier without significant compensation for the credit risk they know they are taking. The solvency issue also plays havoc with the ability of the banks to access the short-term capital markets for their everyday liquidity needs. And, in some cases, especially among the banks in the lower tier countries in the table, those liquidity strains are huge.

If you were a Greek citizen, for example, wouldn’t you go to your bank and withdraw all of the euros you could and put them in your mattress? That is, in order to protect yourself from the prospect of waking up one morning to find that your account was no longer denominated in euro, but in “new drachma” converted on a 1:1 basis, and the free market value of that “new drachma” was such that it took 4 to purchase 1 euro? So, the silent run currently occurring on Greek banks is not surprising.

A similar phenomenon is beginning to happen to the continent’s banks. This is showing itself in the form of an unwillingness of financial institutions to lend to each other and a severe tightening of the private sector money markets.

So, the coordinated move of the central banks announced today is a reaction to the near shut down of the money markets and it makes liquidity available to the continent’s banks. But, this is not the end of the story because this move only addresses the symptoms (the resulting liquidity issues), not the cause (the solvency issues). As we know in America, the Savings and Loan Industry in the 80s was able to access the money markets in $100,000 increments due to FDIC insurance. As a result, the solvency issues weren’t addressed early when they were relatively small. But, eventually, they had to be dealt with.

Thus, the move by the central banks, by printing money and making it readily available to the banks, only postpones the inevitability of having to solve the solvency issues. It buys time. The tradeoff is twofold:

1) it increases inflationary pressures;

2) it allows the solvency problem to continue to fester, and perhaps, become even worse.

The sovereign nations have two choices: inflation or austerity. They would choose the former except for Germany’s resistance. That story is still being played out. For the banks, significant recapitalizations must occur. We are likely to see a lot more drama played out on this issue, especially if one of the larger institutions has a misstep or is attacked by the marketplace as we saw in the U.S. in 2009.