Believe the Hype? Eurozone Collapse Fear-mongering Kicks Into Overdrive

Munchau gives the Eurozone at most 10 days to fix its problems before it implodes.

DeLong argues that "the Federal Reserve needs to buy up every single European bond owned by every single American financial institution for cash”.

But Johnson and Boone say such measures are basically pointless and have declared "The End of the Euro".

All of the above are respected thinkers with loads of experience and credibility, so clearly we are on the precipice of financial apocalypse.

But are we?

The Icy Silence

One country has taken a completely different path to the government and central bank financed bailouts urged by many of the Econoratti as the only way to save the Eurozone (and global economy) from economic catastrophe. That country is Iceland.

Iceland committed financial heresy when it decided to let its three formerly pygmy-sized banks, which rang up a remarkable $100 billion+ in losses, go bankrupt.

And how have things turned out for Iceland? So far, not too shabby.

Sound intergalactic advice

Iceland, an approximately $12 billion GDP economy, is small and none of its banks were Too Big to Fail. So it's an open question whether the example set by Iceland can be repeated by a larger country with a much more important banking system (i.e., Spain or Italy).

Having said that, one of the remarkable things about the current crisis debate is the near complete lack of contemplation of that very question. Instead an almost unanimous call is being made for the Germans to unleash the ECB money printing 'bazooka'. But that is just one of several different options.

As we contemplate Eurogeddon let's keep Iceland in mind. Contrary to what financial scaremongers would have us believe economic life does not come to an end when banks are allowed to fail and countries are allowed to go bust.

Links to Chapters in Michael Lewis' New Book 'Boomerang'

Besides a new preface, which Zerohedge has done a nice job highlighting here, Michael Lewis' new book Boomerang is a collection of his previously written stories about the financial problems of various European countries and one U.S. state (California).

Below are links to each of those stories in the order of their publication. They're all worthwhile and still very relevant.

 1. Wall St. on the Tundra (Iceland)

2. Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds (Greece)

3. When Irish Eyes Are Crying (Ireland)

4. It’s the Economy, Dummkopf! (Germany)

5. California and Bust (California)

Video: Micheal Lewis on Charlie Rose Discussing the Sovereign Debt Crisis

In addition to sovereign debt Michael covers the movie Moneyball, the ongoing Wall St. Occupation, and discusses his style of writing.

A link to the video interview is here.

Also, here is a roundup of the latest reviews of his new book, Boomerang, about the sovereign debt crisis. 

Review Roundup for Michael Lewis' New Book - Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

Below are a list of reviews published so far. And here are links to all the chapters in the book, which were previously published in Vanity Fair (except the book's preface on Kyle Bass).

NY Times

Telegraph

Forbes

Washington Post

Amazon customers

Video: Carmen Reinhart on a Decade of Debt

Here is a link to audio only versions of Carmen's presentation and the Q&A.

Video: Meltdown - Documentary (all 4 parts) on the Financial Crisis

h/t Barry R.

What Iceland and Latvia Can Teach Greece (and Portugal and Ireland)

Not sure whether the below chart, like a picture, is worth 1,000 words, but it says a lot about how quickly Latvia and Iceland have turned around their respective positions in international capital markets by taking swift action.

From The Economist:

Latvia and Iceland successfully issued sovereign bonds at yields approaching Spain's last week. There are rumours that Dubai may follow suit. That the countries which started the sovereign debt crisis are returning to the market while peripheral euro-zone sovereigns continue to struggle has led to crowing from those who see austerity as a misguided strategy for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

The lessons appear to be clear: devalue the currency and wallop foreign creditors to banks, state-owned enterprises and private citizens, honouring only the sovereign’s own obligations. Your reward will be an inversion in credit-default swaps:

More here.

Why Greece Will Default Soon, and What Happens Next

As the haze and rhetoric surrounding the Greek debt crisis begins to lift we can now paint a pretty good picture of what's in store over the next few weeks for Europe's seemingly never-ending debt saga.

The June 29 Deadline

The FT describes the latest details and deadline in the Greek debt endgame:

...pressure is building to have a deal done within three weeks because of an IMF threat to withhold its portion of June’s €12bn bail-out payment unless Athens can show it can meet all its financing requirements for the next 12 months. 

Officials think Greece will be unable to return to the financial markets to raise money on its own in March – as originally planned in the current €110bn package – meaning that the IMF is now forbidden from distributing any additional cash. Without the IMF funds, eurozone governments would either be forced to fill the gap or Athens could default. 

To bring the IMF back in, the new deal must be reached by a scheduled meeting of EU finance ministers on June 20.

The hard deadline may in fact be June 29, when a 12 billion euro ($17bn; £10bn) payment is due to be made to Greece, of which 3.3 billion euros would come from the IMF.

Driving the IMF's credible tough stance are hard lessons learned (and apparently not forgotten) in Latin America a decade ago.


Remembering Argentina

Paul Blustein has written two very insightful and accessible books on recent sovereign defaults and IMF bailouts. His first, titled The Chastening, details the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. His follow-up focussed on the financial crisis which struck Argentina's shortly thereafter, and is titled And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out): Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina. Both books are available in in the Good Books and Films section on the right side of this blog.

Continue reading the full article at SeekingAlpha here.

Podcast: Interview with Michael Lewis, 'Financial Disaster Tourist'

Link to NPR Planet Money podcast featuring Michael Lewis here.

A description of the interview and a few excerpts:

"At bottom, I'm not all that interested in money," Michael Lewis tells us on today's Planet Money. 

"It's peculiar that I've written financial books and worked on Wall Street. ... I'm interested in something else, and I guess that other thing is character and action and the general drift of societies. Money, because people care so much about it ... is this great prism through which to view people."

On the show, we talk about the long arc of Lewis's work. 

In the '80s, he wrote a book about the people who created mortgage-backed securities. Last year, he described people who bet against mortgage backed securities and got rich when they collapsed in the financial crisis. 

In his next book, he'll profile some of the places that got hit particularly hard in the crisis. 

"We're having this global financial crisis. The cause in the various countries is all basically the same thing: it's incontinent credit. It's money washing in at terms that shouldn't be offered, to people who should never be lent money in the first place. ... But in each place, the symptoms are completely different if you look closely."

"So I thought, here we have an opportunity to create a genre: financial disaster travel journalism. We are going to learn about the places through the prism of their financial affairs. They're all subjected to a temptation: a pile of money in a dark room. Do what you want with it. ... They want to do different things in different places. Those are social portraits. They're masquerading as financial pieces."

Michael Lewis On Why Ireland Will Ultimately Default

Michael Lewis

Following up on his previous profiles of bankrupt Iceland and bailed out (for now) Greece, Michael Lewis has a new article titled 'When Irish Eyes Are Crying' in the March Vanity Fair.

I highly recommend carving out time to read the full article, but here are a few choice excerpts:

Not knowing why they were so suddenly so successful, the Irish can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing exactly how successful they were meant to be. They had gone from being abnormally poor to being abnormally rich, without pausing to experience normality. 

Ireland’s financial disaster shared some things with Iceland’s. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. 

The journalists were following the bankers’ lead and conflating a positive outlook on real-estate prices with a love of country and a commitment to Team Ireland. (“They’d all use this same phrase, ‘You’re either for us or against us,’ ” says a prominent bank analyst in Dublin.)

The most obvious change in the country’s politics has been the role played by foreigners. The Irish government and Irish banks are crawling with American investment bankers and Australian management consultants and faceless Euro-officials, referred to inside the Department of Finance simply as “the Germans.” Walk the streets at night and, through restaurant windows, you see important-looking men in suits, dining alone, studying important-looking papers. In some new and strange way Dublin is now an occupied city: Hanoi, circa 1950. 

At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years. 

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith.

If the Irish wanted to save their banks, why not guarantee just the deposits? There’s a big difference between depositors and bondholders: depositors can flee.

Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.” 

Ireland’s 87 percent rate of home-ownership is among the highest in the world. There’s no such thing as a non-recourse home mortgage in Ireland. The guy who pays too much for his house is not allowed to simply hand the keys to the bank and walk away. He’s on the hook, personally, for whatever he borrowed. Across Ireland, people are unable to extract themselves from their houses or their bank loans. Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it.

"Financial-catastrophe tourism" is how Michael describes his visits to various European countries since the financial crisis began.

For more from Michael on his latest story check out the article's accompanying Q&A, where he predicts the Irish people, like the Greeks, will eventually say nach bhfuil níos mó (Gaelic for 'no more') and default:

(quote from Lewis' driver) "The problem with the Irish is that you can push them and push them and push them and they don’t do anything, then they snap and go whacko.” (Lewis' response) I think that’s going to happen. I think that you’re going to be surprised how much punishment they take, and then at some point they’re going to cease to take it. This may be years off; it may not be six months off. I think it’s a pretty slow-burning fuse.

Pay for Say? Outrageous Clip of Fed Governor Mishkin on Iceland's "Financial Stability"

Inside Job, a new documentary set for U.S. release on October 8, is Academy Award nominated Director Charles Ferguson's film about the financial crisis.

I haven't seen the film yet, but it will be worth checking out if the rest of it is anything like the following clip of Columbia University Professor and former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin talking about his infamous Iceland report:

Herbertsson (left), Mishkin (right), unknown person (middle)

In the clip Mishkin responds to questions about a 2006 report he authored titled 'Financial Stability in Iceland'. The report was co-authored with Icelander Economist Tryggvi Thor Herbertsson (pictured right hunting with Mishkin in Iceland). Not long after Mishkin's and Herbertsson's report was published Iceland's financial and banking system collapsed.

Mishkin failed to disclose in his report that he was paid $124,000 by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to write (if in fact he wrote any of it) a stunningly inaccurate testament to Iceland's financial soundness. Mishkin also later renamed the report on his resume to 'Financial Instability in Iceland', an error he chalks up in the Ferguson interview as a "typo".

Here is the full trailer for Inside Job:

Update: Congratulations to Director Charles Ferguson for Inside Job winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary.