Good Morning: The Long & the Short of it and The Bigger Picture - 8 April 2020 - ADM ISI
- Surveys dominate - France and Japan lead the plunge, other indicators
too historical; digesting renewed Eurozone failure to agree Covid-19
package; Coronavirus spread news still very divergent; another very
busy day for bond auctions as IIF highlights outsized surge in debt
- Markets vulnerable to realization that history offers no precedent on
outcomes and timelines
- Global debt growth increasingly more than the 'elephant in the room'
- Charts: IIF Global Debt Growth & EM Fund Flows; US FRA/OIS and LIBOR/OIS
spreads; S&P 500 future (5 days); Japan Economy Watchers Current
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** EVENTS PREVIEW **
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Once again, a busy looking data and events calendar divides into 'real time' items such as the overnight Japan Economy Watchers (Services) survey (plummeting to a new all-time row in an unprecedented collapse - see chart) and Bank of France Industry Sentiment along with US MBS Mortgage Applications, and 'also ran' items: Japan Orders, Australia Housing Finance & Norwegian CPI. Poland's NBP is expected to hold rates at 1.0% (having cut 50 bps in March), while the March 17/18 FOMC minutes seem unlikely to offer much in the way of fresh insights, given that whatever scepticism there might be on the FOMC about the downside risks of the barrage of measures it has implemented or their efficacy, will likely be largely supressed in the interest of not undermining already beleaguered markets. It will be another busy day for govt bond auctions, with another double header from the UK, 10-yr in Germany & the USA and a very large CAD 6.0 Bln 2-yr sale in Canada. As a perspective point, the IIF report yesterday highlighted that govt debt sales rose $2.1 Trln in March alone, or the equivalent of 10% of the size of the US economy - N.B. this is in March 2020 alone. By comparison total global debt (all borrowers) rose by $10.0 Trln during the whole of 2019 (see chart). A further point to consider is there is also $20.0 Trln of global debt which will need to be repaid (highly unlikely) or refinanced in 2020 alone (i.e. not including any new borrowing). Indeed, even in the world of German frugality, the German Finance Agency announced yesterday that federal issuance in Q2 will rise by EUR 43.0 Bln to EUR 130.5 Bln. However it will be the repeated failure of Eurozone Finance Ministers to agree on a collective Covid-19 rescue / stimulus package which continues to beggar belief, above all given the immediacy of the economic and financial needs, and very amply demonstrated by6 the total collapse in the Bank of France's Industry & Services Sentiment surveys. This continues to sustain risks that the Euro area could implode - this is not a central assumption, but the longer this continues, the more damage will be done, and the more already very high tensions between countries threaten to turn into outright confrontation. That is regardless of yesterday's very pragmatic decision by the ECB to enact a major easing of collateral requirements; lending (more non-govt debt) however is as we have argued not the solution, merely a salve to prevent an even greater tightening of financial conditions.
Markets continue to focus on the peak point in the battle against the spread of Coronavirus, even though there is a de facto lack of actual precedent beyond some arbitrary and often highly divergent examples of other flu viruses, which are perhaps less useful given that the characteristics of Covid-19 are more akin to pneumonia, in so far as the current knowledge base goes. Yesterday's sharp about turn in US equities serves as a reminder that any ostensible optimism can evaporate on the toss of a coin. Far more significant for markets is that the shutdown of large swathes of the global economy has no peace time precedent will have far more profound medium-term fall-out, above all because much of the 'output' that is currently being 'lost' will be lost permanently, and the debt that is accumulating at light speed will still have to be to be repaid from future output, in other words a further manacle on the world economy. That said, it will railroad a process of innovation in a genuine sense rather than the 'faux' innovation that has been seen in too much (not majority) of the tech sector, which is merely crushing costs, above all wages.
As I observed in conversation with a fellow analyst yesterday: " You’re not missing anything. Unfortunately the precedent set in 2008 that 'we can't let the global financial system fail' and purge the economy of its weakest components and thereby rewrite economic structures, still remains the modus operandi. It was effectively the death of what is nominally described as capitalism, and represents a fierce defence of so-called vested interests. In turn that is why I always end up coming back to these two quotes from Jakob Burckhardt and William Pfaff:
Burckhardt's unsystematic approach to history was strongly opposed to the interpretations of Hegelianism, which was popular at the time; economism as an interpretation of history; and positivism, which had come to dominate scientific discourses (including the discourse of the social sciences). He also observed over a century ago, the state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and ‘progress’. . . . The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief." {Judgments on History and Historians (tr. Boston: 1958), p. 171 - cited in Super Imperialism by M. Hudson}.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Burckhardt
American author and political commentator William Pfaff has called ‘dead stars’, in reference to the guiding principles of the American political system and hierarchy. The ‘dead stars’ he defines as “ideas that people want or need to be true”, “they are ideas about political change, about the correlation between political and economic progress, and about the universal relevance of certain values and political institutions, which are held to merely because it would be bewildering to be without them. Theoretical formulations that are generally conceded to be false but have become conventional, and for which no replacement is evident, continue to be employed by people who certainly know better. .... There is a real dissociation of perception from analysis and decision. " (Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends, 1989)."