Die EZB könnte es

Was könnten kurzfristige Lösungen gegen das drohende Rezessionsszenario sein?

Zum ersten muss die Abwärtsspirale gestoppt werden. Zum würden sich Eurobonds eigenen, vielleicht mit Bedingungen wie von John Muellbauer vorgeschlagen oder solche die möglichkeit geben die ersten 60% der Staatschulden zu decken (Blue and Red Bonds von Breugel).

Die Vorschläge von H.W. Sinn, die im Sinne von Fekter und Merkel sind, erfordern von der Peripherie wie Deutschland zu werden. Selbst wenn es gelänge, würde es zu lange dauern um die jetzige Abwärtsspirale in der Eurozone zu brechen.

Die EZB könnte dies. Wie auch Karl Aiginger meint. Im Finanzsektor weiss man das schon länger, wie Spiegel-Online schreibt:

Der Chefvolkswirt der Deutschen Bank, Thomas Mayer, hat sich dafür ausgesprochen, eine Art Obergrenze für die Zinsen festzulegen. "Um die Finanzmärkte zu beeindrucken, muss die EZB eine unbegrenzte Interventionsbereitschaft signalisieren", sagte Mayer der "Financial Times Deutschland". Als Vorbild nannte er die Schweizer Nationalbank (SNB), die einen Mindestkurs für den Frankenkurs definierte - und diesen seitdem auch einhält.

Wenn die EZB nicht wie jetzt unwillig Staatspapiere kaufen würde, sondern das Versprechen abgeben würde Staatspapiere zu kaufen um die Zinsen zu stabilisieren, wäre dies viel sinnvoller und eine glaubwürdige Drohung. Karl Smith meint dass die Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeiten gegen die Geldpresse EZB zu spekulieren äusserst gering sind. Das Risiko für die Spekulanten zu verlieren wäre zu groß.

Ultimately bond traders are looking to make money. In the short term you might be looking to support a liquidity position or something, but at the end of the day everyone is looking to increase profitability.

If the ECB stands ready to buy bonds at par for example, then how can it possibly be profit maximizing to sell bonds at below par? It doesn’t matter what the fundamentals are or what the long run is or any of that. So long as you are fully confident that tomorrow you can sell your bond to the ECB at par, it is not sensible to sell it below par today. This means interest rates on Sovereign Debt collapse if the ECB stands ready to trade.

Now, someone could come in and attempt to break the ECB. That is you could say to yourself: I don’t think the ECB really means it. They will fold if they are required to buy more than X bonds.

Then you attempt to short sell them X+1 bonds so that they will break, the price of the bonds will collapse and you can rake in a ton of money. This is a fairly high stakes game and the ECB is very large, so its not clear who will play it.

More importantly, while I definitely see the ECB as the type of institution that would dither while Europe burned and don’t at all see them as the type of institution that would give in to a speculative attack.

I feel pretty confident that they would double down against the speculator and ruin him or her as a matter of principle. Moreover, anyone who is going to loan you the bonds for this attack has got to be worried that the ECB is going to ruin you.

Brad DeLong meint dazu:

It used to be that speculative attacks against the currencies of sovereigns were successful in two cases:

1. When the central bank is trying to keep its currency above its real fundamental value, and is intervening by buying its currency and selling its (limited) supply of harder assets. Then you can break a central bank.

2.When the central bank is trying to keep its currency above its real fundamental value, and is intervening by selling domestic bonds for cash and so pushing up interest rates to make its currency attractive to hold. Then it is defending the dollar by attacking the economy--creating a recession and boosting unemployment. The central bank's ability to do this is determined by its (limited) politicians' willingness to make their voters poor and unemployed. Then you can break a central bank.

Now we have a third case. Note that it is not a speculative attack on a currency: core eurobond interest rates are very very low. And within the current eurozone, the ECB can print enough euros to peg the europrices of the eurobonds of peripheral eurosovereigns wherever it wants to. Given this power, under what circumstances can a speculative attack succeed?

It's not that the ECB is unwilling to buy bonds for cash because it then creates inflationary pressure. The cash it prints goes straight into the speculative balances of the investors who sold the bonds, not into the transactions balances of the economy as a whole. And when the speculative attack passes, the positions are unwound with a profit to the ECB.

Thus the marginal velocity of money created by eurointervention is highly likely to be very small. It's not as though Italy is running a primary deficit or anything.

I don't understand it. It is, it seems to me, an episode of euri sacri fames: the accursed love for the euro as a--well, not a hard currency, exactly, because a currency that collapses and destroys itself is not "hard". Rather, I would say, it is a love of austerity and unemployment for its own sake.

So those who are betting on the collapse of the euro and the exist of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and now France to a weaker currency are making a very big austerity play. They may be correct to make such a play. But it is not a scenario we have ever seen before...

Mit der Stabilisierung der Staatsanleihen würden sich einige Bankenprobleme und damit die Gefahr einer massiven Kreditklemme verringern. Die Bankenkrise in Europa ist eine Staatschuldenkrise und die Staatsschuldenkrise eigentlich eine Bankenkrise. Ohne die angeschlagenen Europäischen Banken mit ihrer durchschnittlichen Leverage von 25:1, (eine Wertreduktion von Aktiva um 4% eliminiert das Eigenkapital) wären die Staaten viel manovrierfähiger. Sie könnten die Eurozone verlassen oder nicht. Aber Staaten, die selbst kein Geld bekommen können keine Banken auffangen, die kein Geld bekommen. In der nächsten Zeit muss einiges an Staatsanleihen und einiges an Bankanleihen verlängert werden.

Wenn nicht bald was passiert, kann es ziemlich dunkel werden.