Is The Italian Elephant About To Break Loose Again?

Market nervousness about Italy has been growing in recent weeks, with the Moody's credit downgrade of the country being only  one of the reasons. A bailout is clearly in the offing, with the only real questions being how and when. While the situation inside his country appears to be deteriorating, Mario Monti has been doing the rounds of European capitals in an attempt to drum up support. While in Helsinki he raised an eyebrow or two when he warned that without a serious plan to bring down interest rates disaffection with the euro in his country could easily grow to dangerous proportions. Crying wolf, or a piece of insider information? Probably a bit of both.

Italy is in a deepening recession which has now lasted for over a year. Monti himself  has ruled out the possibility that he could continue in office after next spring's general elections, while at the same time Silvio Berlusconi is constantly hinting that he would not be averse to accepting prime ministerial office again, should his country need him. All of which makes me ask myself just over a year after my "Is Italy, Not Spain, the Real Elephant in the Euro Room?" post, whether in fact the currently chained beast is not about to break its tethers and go for a crockery breaking rumble round the Euro living room.

What follows is a summary of a revised version of a presentation I gave in Cortona last autumn. I have put the presentation online here.

Low Growth And High Debt, A Highly Combustible Cocktail

Just as I highlighted in the case of Portugal in my recent post, Italy's problem is long term growth. This is not a passing phenomenon, but one which has been getting steadily worse over decades. Italy has lost growth at a pace of about one percent a year over the last four decades. If the pattern continues Italy GDP will drop over this decade and continue to do so for as far ahead as the eye can see.

To give us an idea of what this means, Italian GDP at the end of June was at the same level it first reached in the second quarter of 2003. If the current recession continues as forecast by the Italian government during this year, by December we will be below the GDP level of December 2000, which is another way of saying that it will be below the level first attained some 12 years earlier. If the recession is slightly deeper that the current government forecast, and continues throughout 2013 (certainly not an excluded scenario) we might even arrive at levels first seen in the late 1990s.  In the meantime the country's population will have risen from 57 million to 61 million, hence GDP per capita will have fallen substantially. This is not a situation either to be taken lightly, or one which it will be easy to turn around.

There are a variety of reasons for this sharp drop in growth momentum. Some of the reasons are undoubtedly, as I will argue demographic. Others are associated with the loss of international competitiveness experienced by the  Italian economy since entering the European monetary union.

Once clear indication of the extent to which the deteriorating growth outlook is associated with cometitiveness loss is to be seen in the correlation between worsening growth performance and the deteriorating current account balance.

Double Dip Recession

Italy first fell into recession at the end of 2007 – some months before the other Euro Area countries - and didn’t come out of it again till the start of 2010 , so the economy contracted for two full years. GDP fell by 1.2% in 2008, and by 5.5% in 2009.

After an 18 month recovery, the economy again fell into a second “double dip” recession around the middle of 2011, after a surge in borrowing costs forced the government to apply stringent austerity cuts in an attempt to recover investor confidence.

In the three months up to June GDP contracted for a fourth straight quarter, falling by 0.7 percent over the previous quarter. We don't have the detailed breakdown from the statistics office yet, but it seems clear the contraction was again led by sharp falls in consumption and investment as concerns about the fiscal outlook and the euro area crisis depressed confidence and tightened credit conditions.

It is quite possible that Italy will experience a deeper recession this year and next than most forecasters predict (IMF current 2012 -1.9%), reflecting headwinds from the sovereign debt crisis compounded by Italy’s large planned fiscal adjustment. The government will likely miss its deficit targets and even in the absence of any major shocks to yields, the country’s debt to GDP ratio is surely going to increase significantly over the next few years.

Part of the problem is that Italy's fiscal spending has assumed the importance it has in the country's economy due to the loss of international competitiveness. Reducing the government contribution to GDP in this context only makes the economy fold in on itself. More urgent competitiveness raising issues are needed, ones which will bring quicker results than the ongoing programme of long term structural reforms.

So Just What Do We Mean By International Competitiveness?

The issue of international competitiveness is the one which has perhaps caused most theoretical controversy during the current Euro Area crisis, with one side arguing vehemently that some sort of devaluation is essential, while the other argues equally vehemently that it isn't. In the follwoing slides I propose a slightly new definition of international competitiveness, which is to do with having an export sector which is appropriately large given the median population age of the country concerned.

You can enlarge the slides for easier reading by clicking on them, or alternately you can view them via my slideshare version.

Bottom line:
• Median population age is an important economic indicator
• Populations with high median ages tend to be export dependent
• Export dependency gives a better, more precise measure of international competitiveness.
• An export dependent country is internationally competitive when it has a large enough export sector to drive economic growth.

Italy and The Eurozone Debt Crisis

Total Italian debt is not excessive in comparison with some other countries in the Eurozone, but public debt is the second highest.

Despite having normally run positive primary balances

Italy has run general budget deficits since the 1980s

The problem here is the weight of the debt, the burden of interest payments

Italy Is Now Poised On A Knife Edge

Italian gross government debt to GDP is currently perched just under 123% of GDP. The key factors which will influence the future trajectory are GDP growth, inflation and interest rates. With GDP falling, inflation low and interest rates rising the outlook seems quite problematic. Hence The Problem Of Market Pressure, and concerns about interest rates. Italy is currently paying around 6% for 10 year debt issues, and the average maturity of Italy’s debt is 6.7 years, the lowest level since 2005.

The IMF currently predicts that Gross Government Debt To GDP will peak at 124% in 2013. Any significant slippage on this and debt restructuring becomes inevitable. Investors are worried with good reason. Market responses are not just simple speculation. ECB support is critical, but so are radical measures to increase the growth rate.

Too Big To Rescue?

As stated above, Italy shrank further into recession in the second quarter with a 2.5 per cent annual decline. The 0.7 per cent quarterly fall in gross domestic product, only slightly better than the first quarter’s 0.8 per cent decline, means the economy has now been contracting for over a year, and there is at least another year of the same or worse to come as spending cuts steadily bite and the Euro debt crisis rocks its way forward. The recession will weaken tax revenues and hit jobs and consumer spending, a vicious circle which makes it harder for Mario Monti, who is aiming to cut the budget deficit to 0.1 per cent of GDP in 2014, to meet his public finance goals.

Consumer Confidence and PMI indicators suggest that the Italian government’s GDP growth estimates (of a contraction of 1.2% for 2012 and an expansion of 0.5% for 2013) are way too optimistic . The consumer confidence reading was only just up in July from June's 14 year low, and for the first time since the launch of the PMI services survey in January 1998 firms generally expected output to be lower in a year’s time than current levels.

The employers group Confindustria now forecast a contraction in GDP of 2.4% in 2012. A further fall of 2.0% is not unlikely in 2013 as the European debt crisis worsens. Compared to the other forecasters I would be more negative on the outlook for both private consumption and investment activity. In addition, with a more negative outlook for the euro area economy – destination for 43% of Italian exports — these are unlikely to put in an unexpected stellar performance in 2013.

Unemployment Rising Sharply

Italy's unemployment rate hit a record 10.8 percent in June, up from 10.6 percent in May. There were 2.79 million people looking for work in June, according to seasonally adjusted figures -- a rise of 37.5 percent compared to a year earlier. Youth unemployment dropped from 35.3 percent in May to 34.3 percent. These are not yet anything like Spanish numbers, but they are not to be sneezed at either.

The number of people living in absolute poverty in Italy rose to 3.4 million in 2011, or 5.7 percent of the population, up from 5.2 percent in 2010.Those living in relative poverty for Italian standards were roughly stable at 8.2 million, or 13.6 percent. But among families with no workers and no pensioners, the relative poverty rate rose to 51 percent from 40 percent.

Fiscal Targets Look Increasingly Out Of Reach

The implementation of austerity measures in Italy is likely to have a substantial negative impact on the economy in the coming years. Given its lack of competitiveness, the economy lived off constant demand stimulus from the government. Without this the growth problem is likely to become worse.

There have now been five fiscal packages introduced by Italian governments since July 2011, with the objective of a  cumulative fiscal consolidation of some 5.2% of annual GDP (€85.8bn) between 2011 and 2014. With the majority of the measures concentrated in 2012, there will inevitably be a large negative impact on the economy throughout this year.

Given the deep recession the country will be in over the next couple of years and poor potential growth prospects over the medium- and longer-term, Italy’s public sector balance sheet problems are likely to mount. Although the 2011 fiscal deficit of 3.9% was not particularly high in comparison with many Euro Area countries the governments projection of a close-to-balanced budget in 2014 looks hugely optimistic. A more realistic expectation would be for the deficit to be under the EU 3% level at that stage, but the danger is this could well mean gross debt to GDP will be over 130%. Above the danger mark.

The ECB's role in the crisis both helps and doesn't help, depending on how you look at it. They have been very tardy in acting, and normally when they have done so it is been via half measures which have not got to the heart of the problem. The LTROs are a good example. Italian banks have borrowed more than 283 billion euros from the ECB via the 3 year LTROs and other liquidity operations, but this liquidity is by and large used to either purchase government bonds or buy up their own expiring debt. Buying government bonds is attractive since they pay yields which are far above the ECB lending rates. This difference - the so called "carry" -  helps bank profitability and enables them to recapitalise, but it also means that interest rates charged to small business clients rises as they need to compete with the government for funds. Despite the fact that such practices make the banks more "joined at the hip" than ever with their sovereigns, and that their exposure to losses should the Italian sovereign eventually have to restructure rises, they remain attractive because the risk weighting and hence "capital consumption" of public sector lending under the Basle rules remains absurdly low. This is where the real private sector “crowding out” comes.

Banks increased their holdings of the country’s bonds by about 78 billion euros in the first six months of 2011. This forms part of the “nationalisation” of Europe’s sovereign debt markets. Foreign investors cut their holdings of Italian government securities by 18 percent in March from a year earlier, according to the Bank of Italy. In the same month Italian banks boosted them by 39 percent.

Meanwhile, as we can see in the chart above, the rate of new lending to the private sector has been falling steadily, to both households and corporates. As I say part of the problem is that as the recession deepens the credit risk perception of Italian households and companies deteriorates,as the ECB pointed out in their latest monthly report.

The report immediately produced criticism from the Italian consumers’ association Codacons, who complained that the ECB itself had not found a solution to this situation. “If companies are insolvent it’s because banks are strangling them, denying them credit,” Codacons said. Coldiretti, the Italian agricultural association, also estimates that 60 per cent of companies in the sector risk being starved of credit as they face interest rates that are 30 per cent higher than the average of other sectors.

This problem is more complex than it seems. It is not so much a question of credit being strangled, but of demand being strangled as austerity bites. Companies who cannot sell profitably are a high credit risk. There is demand globally, but as I am saying Italy is insufficiently competitive to take advantage of it. Bottom line, the high cost of financing Italian government bonds is pushing up longer term interest rates, and discouraging investment, and this is an issue the ECB could address, by directly buying commercial paper, for example.

Easing In The Bailout

The possible Italian bailout is fast becoming a tricky political issue. The technocratic government of Mario Monti would like to get an MoU agreed before handing the country back to the politicians.

The request for bond buying would involve ECB secondary market purchases as well as primary market purchases by the EFSF. It would also involve a Memorandum of Understanding which would undoubtedly contain strict conditions and an implementation supervision mechanism. The ECB would surely also have a say in those conditions if bank bond purchases were to form part of the package.  Indeed, the ECB has only this week in its August bulletin made clear what it thinks is required. The Bank suggests countries with high unemployment need to “abolish wage indexation, relax job protection and cut minimum wages”. The bank is not impressed with the Italian labour reform, which is too little too late, and thinks direct wage cuts are now the only workable remedy.

Unsurprisingly, many Italian politicians are highly reticent about being seen to hand over their country’s future to an institution with such views, which if implemented would be massively unpopular in the country, so pressure is mounting for Monti not to ask for help. That having been said, the country really has no alternative if it wants to stay in the Euro.

Is Italy Facing A period of Growing Political Instability?

But this is just it, exactly how committed is the Italian political class to staying in the Euro? Certainly it is the one country on Europe's periphery where you can hear speeches from politicians with serious followings questioning whether there are not alternatives. Indeed Mario Monti warned on just this point during his recent Helsinki visit. "I can assure you that if the (bond yield) spread in Italy remains at these levels for some time then you are going to see a non euro-oriented, non fiscal-discipline-orientated government taking power in Italy," he said.

He was, of course, referring to the ambivalence of Silvio Berlusconi on the Euro issue, and the outright hostility to the common currency displayed by the rising (5) star of Italian politics, Beppe Grillio. “After me the populists”, as Monti once said.

A lot of these statements can be read as brinksmanship, but as BofA Merrill Lynch foreign exchange strategists David Woo and Athanasios Vamvakidis warned in a July 10 report, investors “may be underpricing the possibility of voluntary exit of one or more countries” from the currency bloc. And these countries may not be the ones most widely talk about, like Greece or Spain. It was Italy, the euro area’s third-largest economy, which they found would enjoy a higher chance of achieving an orderly exit than others and would stand to benefit from improvements in competitiveness, economic growth and balance sheets.

Woo and Vamvakidis employed a variant of game theory and found that while Germany could “bribe” Italy to remain in the bloc and avoid the fallout from an exit, its ability to do so is limited. That’s because Italy has more reasons than Greece to leave so any compensation could become too expensive for Germany and Italians may be even more reluctant than the Greeks to accept the conditions for staying.

Interestingly enough in this connection Nomura's Jens Nordvig and Nick Firoozye (whose excellent work on Euro break up dynamics unfortunately did not win them the Wolfson Prize) argue in their afterthought essay (Wolfson: What we learned about the future of Europe, Nine specific lessons from the Wolfson Economics Prize competition) that one of the things they learnt from doing the spadework was the following.

"We have constructed a data base of the relevant liabilities for each Eurozone country, and our calculations show large relevant external liabilities in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. This analysis highlights that currency depreciation following exit from the Eurozone would substantially increase the external debt burden of these countries...."

"Meanwhile, we note that estimated balance sheet effects following exit in the case of Italy and France, are substantially smaller than in other peripheral countries, mainly as a function of the prevalence of local law obligations (which can be redenominated) within external liabilities. It follows that policy makers and investors should pay close attention to the size of balance sheet effect (not only to standard competitiveness and the trade effects) when thinking about the macro impact of specific exit scenarios".

So, summing up briefly, while the Monti Government’s structural reforms are obviously a step in the right direction it is unlikely they will go either far enough or fast enough to significantly lift the country’s potential growth rate from its present lamentable level.  Further, as the April 2013 election approaches  the growing  popularity of new political movements like Beppe Grillo's Five Star one could easily  lead to the kind of political fragmentation already seen in Greece - Italy has hardly been a model example of the two party system -  making the traditional political forces which back the Monti Government even more reluctant to accelerate the adoption of far-reaching reform.

And going beyond April, the political arithmetic of a post Monti government looks complicated, making the kind of stability needed to advance what the population may well see as "harsh" reforms unlikely. In other words, as Monti says, when I go watch out for the populists!

This post first appeared on my Roubini Global Economonitor Blog "Don't Shoot The Messenger".

Monti, The Full Version

The version in question is an interview with the Financial Times. A summary was available here, but now they have gone live with the whole interview. If you can raise it on Google or something then it is well worth a read. For one thing it will offer you a trip down memory lane. Anyone remember this? “If you’ve got a bazooka, and people know you’ve got it, you may not have to take it out.” The reference is, of course, to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who famously used the remark in 2008 congressional testimony. But as Republican Senator Bob Corker pointed out in a subsequent hearing:

“I do want to remind you that the theory behind the bazooka was that if you have a bazooka in your pocket and the markets know that you have it, you will never have to use it. I would like to point out that you not only pulled it out of your pocket and used it, huge amounts of ammunition was pulled out of the taxpayer arsenal to solve that. I think you’ve done some very deft things and I compliment you on that, but the point is that things don’t always work out the way people, in their best efforts, think they’re going to work out.”

Well, the idea just surfaced again, this time from the lips of Mario Monti:

“I’m convinced, and the IMF is also convinced, that the more pledges are made [to the rescue fund], the higher the volume of pledges made, the smaller the probability that a single euro of cash will have to be disbursed.”

But, as former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson once explained, the latest version of the "bazooka" is unlikely to be any more successful than the previous one.

"Today’s proposed bazookas are about providing enough financial firepower so that troubled European governments do not necessarily have to fund themselves in panicked private markets. The reasoning is that if an official backstop is at hand, investors’ fears would abate and governments would be able to sell bonds at reasonable interest rates again. This idea is just as dubious as Paulson’s original notion. Markets are so thoroughly rattled that if a financial backstop is put in place, it would need to be used -- probably to the tune of trillions of euros of European debt purchases from sovereigns and banks in coming months. Whether or not it is used, a plausible bazooka would need to be huge."

Fortunately the ECB has deep pockets, and as I argue in this post, these will probably suffice to keep short term bond yields down to acceptable levels, and help the banks fund themselves and recapitalise. What the ECB's LTRO's won't do is get new credit moving (one significant part of the initiative involves banks in the troubled periphery economies not having to write down the asset side too much too quickly, so there will be little room for "creative destruction"). As fund managers Bridgewater put it recently:

"We believe that a) there are logical limitations to the amounts of debt that creditors will choose to lend to debtors, b) at this time numerous debtors have passed their limits, and c) the projected rates of adjustment that policy makers are using, which generally mean slightly slower rates of increase in indebtedness rather than debt reductions, cannot happen. In other words, despite attempts of policy makers to push this debt expansion further, they can’t. Significant funding gaps will remain....... understandably, central banks are now trying to fill the funding gaps with abundant liquidity. At the same time, banks must contract and consolidate as they can’t adequately recapitalize."

Leaving aside the tricky issue of the extent to which the latest Euro management initiative will work, Monti does have more interesting things to say. He is, for example, quite positive about Standard and Poor's:

“If I ever dictated anything, it must have been what S&P had to say about domestic Italian economic policy,” he chuckles, before quickly correcting himself: “I never said the three letters BBB,” a reference to Italy’s new S&P rating of triple B plus........“It’s very interesting when they go through the various factors, and concerning the political risk factor they say there is one negative: ‘The European policymaking and political institutions, with which Italy is closely integrated’,” he says. “And then they go on, saying, ‘Nevertheless, we have not changed our political risk score for Italy. We believe that the weakening policy environment at European level is to a certain degree offset by a strong domestic Italian capacity’. “I think I’m the only one in Europe not to have criticised the rating agencies,” Mr Monti boasts.”

As Peter Spiegel and Guy Dinmore not unreasonably conclude, the reason for this positive tone is clear: "Mr Monti’s 60 days in office have been enough to convince the agency that his government is on a path of reform that could return the country to growth and shrink its debt levels, but that European Union mismanagement of the eurozone debt crisis is dragging down struggling countries, including Italy with its €1,900bn ($2,400bn) debt mountain".

"Over the course of the 90-minute interview, Mr Monti is careful not to challenge his counterparts directly. Asked whether the S&P analysis is a condemnation of Ms Merkel, who is widely viewed as the driver of the current response to the eurozone crisis, he is diplomatic: “I don’t think we can really single out one country or one person,” he says. Later on, when asked how concerned he is that strikes by taxi drivers and pharmacists could derail his reforms at home, he insists that when he wakes up in the morning, he is more concerned with “European leadership” than domestic unrest. “European leadership – not the German chancellor,” he quickly clarifies."

Italy Braces Itself For The Full Monti

The Italian government, Mario Monti informed the country's parliament last Thursday, is now planning to concentrate its attentions on achieving economic growth. A timely decision this, since the statistics office announcement a day earlier that the country had once more fallen back  into recession, while not being a surprise nonetheless does constitute a cause for concern. Not that Italy is any stranger to recession, since the country has now had five of them since entering Europe's Monetary Union at the turn of the century. In fact the Italian economy has now contracted in eight of the last 15 quarters, and GDP is back in the good old days of 2003, stuck below the level it first attained in the first three months of 2004. And of course it is now going backwards in time again. Depending on the depth of the recession now being provoked it is touch-and-go whether the economy might not at some point even revisit levels last seen in the closing years of the 1990s. And remember, this is not deflation ridden Japan, this is real, not nominal GDP we are talking about here. So far Italy hasn't been experiencing deflation, or at least not yet it hasn't.

All in all, it would be hard to say that the Euro has worked well for the Italians. Maybe it was a great opportunity that the country was unable to take advantage of, but in any event all they are going to see from here on in is the downside part of it. The inability to adjust the value of a domestic currency they don't have to compensate for all that wantonly lost competitiveness means they are going to have to do things the hard way, subjecting themselves to a collective ingestion of codliver oil the like of which the country has not seen since the harsh days of the1920s.

Sinking Below Ground

The extent of the problem the country now has can be easily seen in the chart below, which shows annualised growth over a decade (as a moving average). What is absolutely shocking is that in the ten years  up to 2010 Italy had an average annual growth rate of just 0.28%. Assuming growth of about 0.5% in 2011 (which may now be generous), in the decade to 2011 this will drop to 0.15%, and if we pencil in a contraction of 1% in 2012 (perfectly realistic, in fact it will probably be worse) then the number turns negative. That is to say, on average the Italian economy will have shrunk every year for a decade.

Some may say that this result is in part a by-product of the global crisis, and they would be partly right. But look at the trend over the last three decades, far from seeing some stylised version of steady state growth hovering around a constant mean, the rate of expansion in Italian output has been heading relentlessly downwards, so logically it was always bound to cross the zero line at some point. That point now seems to be about to arrive in 2012, a year which may mark a before and after in modern Italian history.

Naturally, the reason why Italian growth has fallen so far is the big point at issue here. One of the reasons is obviously a competitiveness loss resulting from higher than Eurozone average inflation sustained over a long period, but another component is possibly the impact of population ageing, which has hit Italy more than any other European country except for Germany, and it is with Germany, of course, that Italy has the largest competitiveness loss. Demographically speaking Italy is Germany minus all that export competitiveness.


Looked at from another angle, like many other countries Italy probably grew rather over trend in the years between 2004  and 2007, and then dropped back sharply in 2008. But the Italian economy fell further than most of its peers, and subsequently really failed to recover. This is the clearest demonstration of the competitiveness problem, and it won't be easy to address.

It's The Competitiveness Silly!

As is well known Italy is weighted down by a massive burden of public debt (120% of GDP). Even before the recent surge in Italian bond yields servicing this debt consumed an onerous volume of government income. But this debt alone does not explain why Italy has such a poor track record. Japan, for example, has a debt burden of over 200% of GDP and still manages to eke out a better growth trajectory. The two countries are similar in that domestic demand is permanently weak (they both have elderly populations, with a median age of around 45) yet difference between the two countries is obvious, since Japan (like Germany) has a large and dynamic export sector which generates a trade and current account surplus, and this buoys investment and GDP growth. Italy, on the other hand, has a trade and current account deficit, and both of these have been worsening since the end of the last recession.

Naturally a negative trade balance weakens the GDP reading, given the impact of the net trade effect, but curiously the recent GDP slowdown has been associated with a drop in government spending (which is what previously had been sustaining Italian GDP in positive territory), a fall in domestic consumption, and a consequent fall in imports (which is why the trade balance has been improving somewhat of late). Indeed, the reduction in imports meant that the net trade effect was one of the few positive points in the latest GDP reading - even while the economy contracted by 0.2% net trade added 0.8 percentage points to what would otherwise have been a devastatingly bad number. So there is no need to call in inspector Clusot to find out what happened, it was clearly the sharp cut in government consumption that finally killed off the fragile Italian recovery, although naturally, given that government debt was - and has been for some years - on an unsustainable path, the spending tap had to be shut off at some point. What Italy now needs - like so many of the countries on the EU periphery -  is a sharp improvement in international competitiveness and a significant surge in investment into the export sector. The two of these naturally go together, since few will invest in activities which are unlikely to be competitive and profitable.

Italy does have a stronger export sector than some of its Southern European counterparts, and exports did surge as the global economy started to recover (see chart above), but they never managed to reach their pre crisis level, and now, at least according to the latest PMI surveys, they are weakening once more as the European and global economy slows.

Italy was far from having a consumer boom during the good years of the first decade of this century. In fact household consumption grew by less than 5% between 2000 and 2008, and in any event the pace was much slower than in the 1990s (see the shift in steepness of the slope in the chart below).

Retail sales have been falling since 2007.

And construction spending has been one steady slide down.

And yet, despite all the pressure on Italian banks there is (as of October) no sign yet of a sharp credit crunch affecting either firms or households, since private sector credit is still growing at an annual rate of around 4%, a stark difference from the picture in Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal where private sector credit is steadily contracting.

No Boom, No Bust


So to be clear, Italy did not have any sort of housing or credit driven boom during the first decade of the century, Italian households and companies are not massively in debt when compared with their Euro Area peers, and credit is not in especially short supply. Ageing population dynamics lead domestic consumption to be weak in Italy (following a pattern which is strikingly similar to that seen in Japan and Germany), yet Italy's export sector has been allowed to drift as competitiveness has been lost. Really the most telling chart I have is this one, which shows how as the current account surplus has widened (ie as competitiveness has been lost) long term growth has steadily declined.

With neither exports nor private consumption able to pull the economy the state has been under constant pressure to offer support via deficit spending, leading to the accumulation of an unsustainable quantity of government debt. This deficit spending is about to come to an end (permanently according to the latest EU agreement), and under these circumstances the economy is likely to remain in or near contraction for as long as it takes to recover competitiveness. The question is, how long is that going to be, and what will happen to the debt dynamics in the meantime.

To take the second question first, one of the reasons that many are confident Italy will make it on through with the debt challenge is the country's recent record in controlling the deficit. According to OECD data, while Italy ran a cyclically adjusted primary deficit every year between 1970 and 1991, it ran a cyclically adjusted primary surplus every year since 1992. That is to say, before allowing for interest payments Italy has not been running a deficit for many years now, and it is simply the burden of servicing the accumulated debt which is causing the country to spend more than it receives in revenue. As many of those who are in the "optimistic" camp on the question of the country's ultimate solvency eagerly point out, Italy’s cyclically adjusted primary balance as a proportion of GDP has remained in a better shape than those of the largest developed countries as well as those of European peripheral and core countries since the onset of the crisis. It is only the legacy of the past which acts like a dead weight pulling the country down, but what a legacy this is, and especially as yields on Italian debt have steadily risen.

Poised On A Knife-edge

But given everything it is clear that Italian debt, and with it the future of the Euro, now sits poised on a knife edge, as is illustrated in the chart below (which comes from Barclay's Capital). If you take a neutral scenario where Italy has a balanced budget and a sum total of zero nominal GDP growth (ie growth+inflation = 0) debt stays put at 120% of GDP out to infinity.

But then imagine the average finance cost of Italian debt rises, and stays high. In this case  the only way to compensate  is by running a larger primary surplus (ie more spending cuts, or revenue increases to compensate for the extra interest cost). The net effect of this would either be to generate deflation or a more sustained economic contraction, in which case debt to GDP would start to rise indefinitely. Think of it like this, either prices fall by one percent and GDP (via exports) rises by 0.5% (for example), in which case nominal GDP falls 0.5% a year (the Japan type case), or prices rise by 0.5%, exports lose more competitiveness, and so growth falls by 1%. I mean, this example is only illustrative, but it is meant to give some sort of feel for what "knife edge dynamics" really mean.

In fact, before the recent surge in the spread, average interest costs on Italian debt had been falling in recent years, but now they are evidently rising again. It is very important here to remember that  yields in bond auctions only affect new emissions of debt (and changes in the secondary market only really affect banks, and sovereigns through possible needs to recapitalise banks). So it is a question of years before the higher levels "lock in" - the average maturity on Italian debt, for example, is around 7.2 years, and indeed since governments finance at fixed and not floating rates (not at a certain % above 3 month Euribor, for example), debt costs are at much at risk from increases in ECB base rates as they are from the actual spread with German bonds. Any substantial increase in interest costs naturally makes selling debt more expensive. Fortunately for peripheral sovereigns, the likelihood of ECB rate rises in the foreseeable future is near to null.

No Way Back Home

But again, let's do another thought experiment. Imagine I am right, and  Italian debt is on a knife edge path, and suppose the average interest rate on the whole debt creeps up by 1 percentage point. With debt at 120% of GDP, then the primary surplus to cover the added interest costs and maintain a balanced budget would be 1.2% of GDP. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that increasing the primary surplus by 1.2% pushes Italian debt to gdp up to 125% (via a combination of either deflation or economic contraction), then the next year the primary surplus would need to be up by an additional 0.05%, helping force debt to GDP up even further and so on and so forth. This is why people call this the debt snowball. The point is, whichever way you turn, you seem to find the exit door locked.

Coming back to the details of the present situation, the Italian government has committed itself to a consolidation program worth €74bn over the next two years amounting to roughly 3.7% of GDP. This is designed to bring the budget into balance (or the deficit to zero) by the end of 2013. On quite conservative assumptions, just to tread water, and maintain the debt level where it will be in 2013 (which will be more than 120% of GDP due to the recession), Italy will need a primary surplus of 2.3% of GDP.

But then we need to think about the recently undertaken commitment to reduce the debt (the last EU summit). The exact numbers have yet to be agreed for the new pact, but it looks like a cyclical maximum of 0.5%, and (even more importantly) a commitment to reduce outstanding debt over 60% of GDP by 5% a year. This, in Italy's case will mean the country is going to need (from 2014 onwards) a primary balance of something like 5.5% of GDP (depending on the evolution of interest costs) over the rest of this decade. Which means the Italian economy is going to face an even more restrictive fiscal environment.

Now, those who argue the Italian crisis will have a happy outcome point to history, and argue that Italy was able to achieve a primary surplus of around 5% on average during the years 1995-1998, so why shouldn't the country be able to do this again? The main counter argument would be that that was then, and this is now. That is to say, these were the years of Italian "coupling" with monetary union, sizable privatisation programmes, falling (not rising) interest rates, and basically Italian trend growth had not fallen as far as it has now.

Moreover, the external environment in Europe will not exactly be conducive to boosting exports. Even core Euro Area countries are commited  to undertaking additional fiscal consolidation beyond what is currently envisaged in order to comply with the new debt rule. Taking 2014 as the starting point, debt to GDP for the Euro Area as whole might be something like 90%. Hence the 1/20th rule would imply that on aggregate the Euro Area will need to reduce its debt ratio by around 1.5 percentage points per year. If this agreement is complied with the adjustment will almost certainly imply a net fiscal drag on growth in the years following 2013. Of course, if it is not complied with then it will almost certainly be "bye bye Euro" (assuming the common currency still exists that far up the road).

It's All About Structural Reforms, Or Is It?

So basically, what the whole argument about whether or not Italy can make a final burst and reach the finishing line is all about structural reforms, and whether the country can get enough growth (quickly enough) to turn the "knife edge trap" around. Personally I am extremely doubtful that it can, which is why I placed so much emphasis on the growth performance in the first section. The turnaround needed here is massive. It is a 30 year decline we are talking about, and I doubt short of outright default and substantial devaluation we have historical examples of anyone doing this. The adjustment made in Germany between 1999 and 2005 was much smaller in comparison.

One of the proposals is to introduce labour market reforms to increase participation rates, but in fact the Italian labour force grew substantially between 2004 and 2008 (due to large scale immigration), with employment being up by over a million (or around 5%, see chart above), yet the increase in output was ridiculously small. On the other hand we know the Italian working age population is contracting (and the average age rising), while the elderly dependent population is increasing rapidly. Conventional economic models tend to be silent on this issue, but common sense should tell us that this is going to take its toll on growth - a factor the "structural reform answers all our problems people" don't seem to have given enough thought to.

The Monti government needed  just five weeks in office to push through an additional 30 billion-euro emergency budget package, but how long will he need to get GDP growth back up above 1% annually? And how much time does he have? Investors initially cut him some slack, but judging by the reaction to the final approval of the package by the Senate - the yield on Italy’s 10- year benchmark bond was pushed up by 12 basis points to 6.91%, dangerously close to the key 7% level (although still somewhat below the Euro era record hit on November 9, just before Monti took charge). 7% is  widely considered to be critical if sustained for any great length of time, partly due to the cost of debt servicing but also because of the level of dependence of Italian banks on the ECB that it would produce.

Till The Dowgrades Fall


So the "Full Monti" effect now seems to have  been priced in, while investors nervously wait to see what the real plan for Spain and Italy actually is.

The first quarter of 2012 looks to be critical for Italian debt, with about one third of the total Euro Area debt maturing being Italian. Indeed the battle starts this week with the Treasury having to sell an assortment of T-bills and 2 year and 10 year bonds. In addition the Italian government is now increasingly guaranteeing bonds issued by Italian banks to be used as collateral at the ECB  - with about 40 billion euros being issued last week according to some estimates. So effectively Italy is now more or less guaranteeing the banking system with the likely outcome that ratings agencies will be even harder on the sovereign rating.

Not that the outlook was exactly bright on that front anyway. Understandably, Italy was among the 15 Euro Area countries Standard & Poor’s placed on review for a possible downgrade on December 5. This follows an earlier downgrade to a single A by the agency in September. In addition, Spain and Italy were both warned by Fitch (which cut Italy's rating to A+ on October 8) on December 15 to brace for a further debt downgrade after concluding that a "comprehensive solution to the eurozone crisis is both technically and politically beyond reach". And to complete the set, Moody's, which cut the country to A2 on October 4, maintained a negative outlook, signifying that a further dowgrade in the coming months was highly probable  The bottom line is that Italy is both too big to fail and too big to be bailed out, which is why it is still hanging dangerously in limbo-land. Since, as I argue in this article, some sort of restructuring or other is well nigh inevitable in the Italian case, the sooner Europe's leaders work up a credible plan on how to achieve this, the better. Otherwise it will not only be Italy's citizens who are subjected to the Full Monti, Europe's leaders may also find themselves with their credibility stripped naked.

This post first appeared on my Roubini Global Economonitor Blog "Don't Shoot The Messenger".

The Policymaker's Fear Of The Italian Penalty Shot

“While the impact of service-sector liberalization and privatizations may be positive on medium-term growth, the budget cuts are likely to have quite negative effects on the short-term GDP dynamic. We expect Italian GDP growth to slow to close to zero in 2012 and 2013.” Giada Giani, Citigroup

According to one anonymous German official speaking off the record to reporters from Der Spiegel, "a country like Italy can't be saved". We will have to trust that he was referring to the country's size when he made the statement, and not its existential core. If he was, he may well be right, at least under the Euro Area's current institutional arrangements. Let's take a quick look at why.

The ECB Backstop Works For Now

The Italian debt markets are a lot calmer this week than they were the week before last. Evidently there is a simple explanation for the phenomenon, and that is that the level of Italian bond yields is now more or less completely guaranteed by the European Central Bank (the ECB). Systematically and meticulously, the Italian ten year bond yield is being maintained at or around the 5% level by a team of dedicated bond traders in national central banks dotted around the Euro Area.

The process whereby this result is achieved is not that dissimilar to other more common central bank interventions, for eaxmple to target a certain exchange rate, or a given overnight interest rate. Basically, when the yield rises above a given threshold the ECB's representatives simply step in and buy bonds. This happened last week to the tune of some 22 billion euros, with bonds being acquired from a set of 5 EU peripheral countries, although we don't know how the purchases were broken down at national levels. One thing was for sure, there were a hell of a lot of Italian bonds tucked in there somewhere.

The problem for the bank now is that once you initiate a programme like this, there is no easy way to stop. Despite many voices who argue the contrary, Italy's problem is not simply a short term liquidity one (funding a deficit), it is a long term solvency one (servicing an enormous pile of debt and growing at the same time). While the country has long maintained a primary surplus, the weight of the debt has drifted steadily onwards and upwards. Italy is caught in a conundrum. With low growth you need inflation to be able to make the books balance, but this excess inflation makes the country's competitiveness problem steadily worse. If you implement the reforms needed to make the economy more competitive then you don't get the inflation, and if you take away the deficit in the meantime then you simply don't get growth. This is a zero sum game in which all the numbers don't add up.

At the push of an ECB "buy" button, Spanish and Italian sovereign bonds have effectively been taken out of the markets, and it is now hard to see how (without some sort of restructuring or other) they can now ever get back in again.

In ceding to pressure from Europe's leaders to take this decision, the central bank has now gotten itself locked onto the horns of a huge dilemma, and they are going to have great difficulty finding a way to extract themselves from it. Monsieur Trichet has lodged his finger well and truly inside the wall of the dike, and should he even momentarily take it out again, the whole structured could easily rupture, with many of the things we now know and love getting carried away in the ensuing flood.

Of course, the mere threat that he might one day do this does serve to concentrate all the various minds involved, but what is involved is a form of brinksmanship which could in itself one day become a problem.

A glimmer of what the bank is now getting itself involved in can be seen in last week's ECB balance sheet reading, since it grew to the year-to-date high of 2.073 trillion euros last, largely as a result of increased lending to eurozone financial institutions and additional sovereign bond purchases.

The balance sheet was up by 68.736 billion euros over the previous week, and 119.94 billion euros over the same period one year ago. In part the balance sheet surge was due to an increase in net lending to credit institutions (which increased by 98.3 billion euros to 393.3 billion euros). And in part it was up due to the 22 billion euros spent in bond purchases. Curiously the weekly fixed term deposit levels remained unchanged at 74 billion euros (the quantity spent in periphery bond purchases to date), which sort of settles the issue of whether the bank were going to "sterilise" the new purchases, or create additional money to pay for them. For the time being at least they seem to be doing the latter, since going by the size of the banks current account holdings (which jumped to 286.783 billion from 159.814 billion euros a week before) they seem to have offset the purchases through money creation.

Basically central bank bond purchase intervention is deemed to be "neutral" in monetary policy terms if an equivalent quantity is drawn back from the banking system by attracting new term deposits at the central bank. That the bank may be carrying out a "money printing" exercise (and especially one to monetarise the debt of certain countries in particular) is raising fears of impending inflation. My feeling is that, in the context of heavily over a leveraged private sector and congenitally weak domestic demand, this is not a real concern at present for the Euro Area. I think the ECB's own inflation alert was always overdone, since most of the inflation we have seen of late has either been imported (via rising energy and commodity prices) or adminstratively generated via consumption tax increases. There has been very little in the way of second round effects.

The real worry then should not be inflation, but whether or not the Italian government will ever be in a position to honour the bonds in full, and on time. At the present time this is only a theoretical question, since additional bond purchases can always enable the Italian state to meet its obligations, with the ECB facilitating debt rollovers by using the commercial banks as proxies in the primary markets. But just how deep in do you want to get? At the present time the bank owns something like 20% of outstanding Portuguese, Irish and Greek debt. 20% of Italian debt would be something like 380 billion euros, a volume of bonds which would already be difficult to pass over to the EFSF (or its heir the European Monetary Fund). But in this case the force of tradition is not strong, and there is no real reason why the bank need stop at 20%. The sky could be the limit, and the ECB could be transformed into the new Bank of Japan, effectively light years away from the earlier visions of the Bundesbank founding pioneers. And, of course, we would all be into one of those processes which can go on for just as long as they can.

The Balanced Budget Ammendment

At the heart of the recent ECB decision lay something known as the balanced budget ammendment. First introduced in Germany in 2007, this is a constitutional change which (in the German case) makes a deficit of over 0.35% of GDP illegal as of 2016. One of the conditions the ECB imposed on Italy was that they also change their constitution, but in this case outlawing deficits as of 2013. Effectively, and at a single stroke, this brings to an end a whole era of Keynesian counter-cyclical fiscal policy and economic management. So the implications are large, and hard to separate from the rapidly ageing population phenomenon.

While it was the size of the latest package of cuts which hit the headlines (Rome orders €45bn in cuts and taxes), the key issue was really the balanced budget ammendment, since this has one clear implication: as of 2013 there will be no new bonds. So at least now the outer limit of ECB exposure is a known fact.

Chronicle Of A Crisis Long Foreseen


While the Italian crisis may have crept up on markets all at once and unexpectedly, issues about the sustainability of Italian debt are not new. As FT Alphaville's James Coterill noted when the latest wave in the Italian crisis broke out: "In the original ‘why the eurozone will break up’ papers of the 1990s and early 2000s, it was never ever high Greek deficits, or Irish (or Spanish) bank losses going on to public balance sheets that were forecast to destroy the single currency. It was always Italy. High-debt, low-growth, Italy".

Exacty, Italy was always the greatest worry on everyone's minds, including the ECB's. Indeed, the now long forgotten minimum rating requirements for collateral posting at the bank were first muted by them with precisely Italy in mind. I myself wrote one blog post after another (see links below) warning of the danger which was looming, buried in Italy's toxic combination of low growth, rapidly ageing population and high accumulated debt. It was simply a crisis waiting to happen, and now it has. As the New York Times' Landon Thomas noted in the Blog Prophet of Eurozone Doom article he wrote about my work, "Mr. Hugh’s demographic thesis is not airtight: in fact, it was Italy, not Greece, that attracted his early attacks. But Italy, perhaps because its overall debt level was already so high and its population was older, pursued a policy of greater fiscal rectitude than its neighbors and avoided a real estate bubble".

Not airtight, but nearly-so it seems, since behind the short term obsession with fiscal rectitude there lie the longer term preoccupations about solvency and debt. And here Italy (and eventually Japan) jump right back into the cockpit. As Landon mentions, Italy didn't have a housing boom worthy of mention, so private debt didn't surge during the first decade of the century, and during the crisis Finance Minister Tremonti pursued a policy of flying under the radar by keeping deficit spending low. But now short term deficit issues are waning, and longer term solvency questions are surfacing in the wake of the renewed Greek crisis. Thus, while historians of the future may well struggle to understand just how it was that a simple fiscal deficit bailout programme was so badly handled that Greek sovereign debt shot up from around 110% of GDP entering the crisis to around 170% by the end of the "rescue" period (and this without even having enjoyed a real housing bubble, ie with a private sector that was not massively in debt), the Italian case will raise few eyebrows, since every thinking economist had seen it coming for so long (Japan too, see my Italy blog here, here, here and here).


Low Growth and Ageing Workforce Are A Troubling Backdrop

Italy's problem is not its fiscal deficit, in fact in every year since 1991 Italy has run a cyclically adjusted primary balance (that is before interest payments are taken into account), it is the weight of the accumulated debt burden and low growth. The country's trend growth rate has been falling for decades, and during the first decade of the present century it only managed to grow at an average rate of about 0.6% per annum.

Even though the quarterly GDP growth rate accelerated slightly in Q2, and reached a quarterly rate of 0.3% (up from the 0.1% expansion achieved in the first three months of this year), the slowdown in core Europe, and the readings on the most recent PMIs leave little doubt that the respite will be short lived. At this point even the current IMF forecast for modest 1% GDP growth in 2011 is looking very optimistic. And if the country now slips back into recession (certainly not excluded) then the under-performance would be much greater.


The worrying thing is how Italy has been able to get so little growth out of so much. This is especially the case when you take into account the fact that during the last decade the country's labour force grew steadily, following the arrival of several million new migrant workers. Between 2002 and 2010 the number of non-Italian citizens officially residing in Italy was up by 3 million (or 200%).



During this time the labour force grew by about a million:


while employment was up by around 1.5 million.



Yet GDP barely rose. In fact, since Italy left recession the number of those employed has hardly risen, while the percentage of those who are formally unemployed has remained near its crisis highpoint, which has been good for productivity, but not for consumer consumption. The ideal combination would be to see both output and employment growing in tandem, but with output growing faster than employment. At the present time employment is hardly growing, and the rate of increase in output is slowing notably. That is to say we do not have "lift off".




Slamming The Debt Brake Pedal Down To The Floor Won't Work

Despite the fact that the real leverage M Trichet now has over the Italian government is being exercised in order to obtain the constitutional change required for the balanced budget rule to be put in place, the severity of the fiscal tightening that Italy will now experience should not be taken lightly. In the first place something like 45 billion euros in new cuts will be implemented in 2012 and 2013, and this will be on top of the previously agreed package of 47.8 billion euros in cuts between now and 2014 agreed in the July budget.

In addition Italy will now aim for a general budget deficit no greater than 0.2% of GDP in 2013 (Germany will not achieve this result till 2016), and will maintain that ceiling into the indefinite future. Basically, this will mean the post 2012 Italian budgets will need to aim for an average primary surplus of just under 5% of GDP during the subsequent years, as the weight of the debt is gradually ground down, and the burden of interest costs reduced. This is a difficult, but not impossible task.Between 1995 and 1998, when Italy’s undertook its maximum effort to enter the monetary union, the average primary surplus was 5.0% of GDP. However, during the second half of the 1990s Italy was benefiting from both decreasing interest rates and also from the depreciation of the Lira. In addition the Italian government also implemented a significant privatization programme which helped to reduce the debt/GDP ratio. Most of these positive tailwinds will not be available this time round.

As Deutsche Bank analyst Marco Stringer puts it: "While there are no doubts that Italy needs to maintain a very prudent fiscal policy, there is a risk that an excessive fiscal consolidation could be counterproductive were it to have a significant negative effect on growth".

There is a very real possibility that Italy's fiscal consolidation, like Greece's, is so sharp as to be counter-productive, with the low inflation, low growth and revenue shortfalls making it extremely difficult for the country to reduce to debt to GDP level, even if the ECB maintains 10 year bond yields around 5%. Writing in the Financial Times, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde makes exactly this point. “We know that slamming on the brakes too quickly will hurt the recovery and worsen job prospects. So fiscal adjustments must resolve the conundrum of being neither too fast or too slow. Shaping a Goldilocks fiscal consolidation is all about timing. What is needed is a duel focus on medium-term consolidation and short-term support for growth and jobs", she said.

So we really do now have a very high risk stand-off, with Monsieur Trichet and his colleagues holding the whip hand for the time being, as the threat to take the finger out of that dike concentrates attention on the issue in hand. But this upper hand has a definite sell-by date looming if the implementation of the debt-brake principal in a context of global slowdown (or recession) proves too severe for Italian voters to accept. Then the Italian politician's fear of the penalty shot from someone on his own side might just become stronger, despite his apprehension before the technical superiority of M. Trichet's footwork. In which case, someone should remind them over at the ECB that, as Paul Krugman puts it, "once once a country takes on the fixed cost of default, it might as well impose a big haircut on creditors". As the United States discovered in Vietnam, it's easy enough to get yourself bogged down in a mess, but a lot harder to extricate yourself from one subsequently.

This post first appeared on my Roubini Global Economonitor Blog "Don't Shoot The Messenger".