Update: Scenarios for Greece
Egads, Reuters has a really great set of scenarios for how the Greek crisis could play out.
Good stuff, very positive to see in major media.
Sovereign debt underlies a new era
We’ve been sitting back, examining the situation of sovereign debt in Europe and watching its impact on global markets.
Today, Greek debt is reduced to junk bond status, and a two-year bond’s yield has reached 26%. It was 18% yesterday.
As much as European officials say that this won’t have any systemic impact, that is often what people say when they don’t want it to have impact.
Think of multiple scenarios for this outcome. Use game theory, scenario planning, or old-fashioned guessing – but think it through.
Greece, Portugal, and sovereign debt: The next phase
Somewhere between California’s budget shortfall and Vermont’s neosecessionist movement, somewhere between Arizona thinking of sell the gold off the dome in the state capitol building to Michigan pulling away police department units, somewhere between Portugal and Greece, it has become evident that just because the American and European Central Banks could solve “the crisis” through deficit spending, not everyone would be able to keep up the illusion.
Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge says it in typical brilliant, pithy, fin-de-siècle wit:
The only thing in this world worse than Hank Paulson showing up in Congress with his initial 3-page TARP proposal giving him unlimited control over the US printing press? 12 non-Hank Paulsons, all of whom speak different languages, all of whom are hell bent on bailing everyone and everything out (just not on their political or physical dime…or 10 eurocents as the case may be), and all of whom have no idea how to bail out others’ (and soon their own) economy… oh, and none of whom have access to Hank’s reserve currency printer. In short, more than 24 hours after announcing a “bailout” of Greece, nobody in Europe has any idea what they need to do to actually “bail” Greece out.
The larger issue here is the primacy of centralized banking authorities, central currencies, even central governments. Those large and unwieldy organizations can resist a great number of insults, and they have more options available to them that their smaller counterparts – but they are not invincible. When faced with a large enough catastrophe, they too must feel the pain, react, choose a new path.
It’s time to think in terms of scenarios. One scenario would be that the world’s central banks manage to keep the cash flowing among countries and banks and bond holders and municipalities, even in the face of expensive entitlements, shifting asset values, rising unemployment, and stagnant wages. Status quo. Now, what are the chances that things don’t change in the face of the trends that are so evident.
One other scenario is a series of defaults from smaller nations, regions, and municipalities unable to make their minimum payments, challenging the legitimacy of central control, requiring additional taxes levied on those areas who are tax-cashflow positive. What happens when entire cities, regions, and sovereign nation-states simply withdraw from the global system? What happens to currency? Which geopolitical tensions will flare up? What goods and services might stop flowing? What could happen in the next phase?
Look, if you’re running a business of any size, this is probably pretty heady stuff. Most of us never went to school to remake the geopolitical and financial systems. Nobody woke up this morning hoping to re-justify the fiscal reasoning behind the European Union, or the constitutional relationship of the U.S. federal government with the States.
Then again, nobody really wanted to be all that interested in subprime versus Alt-A mortgages, nor their relationship to CDOs and CDSs, did they? But we all got a good lesson.
If there’s a forecast in here from us, it’s this: we have a surplus of complexity in the world’s fiscal and financial dealings. Nobody can really understand them, which is why they are so hard to manage, even from New York, Washington, Brussels, and Hong Kong. And for that reason, things may get much less complex in the years to come.
Think about what that means.
China’s debt risk management isn’t much better
It looks like the United States and England aren’t the only countries facing billions in bad loans.
When you read “trillions of renminbi of defaulting loans already in China that no one is doing anything about,” you perk up about the coming crises in sovereign debt and realize it is truly global, with global repercussions.
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