Ponzi Games

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The Credit StrategistThis essay is excerpted from a recent version of The Credit Strategist (formerly the HCM Market Letter). To obtain the complete issue, you must subscribe directly to this publication; Please go here. The Credit Strategist is on Twitter - @credstrategist


“As Rogoff and his co-author Maurice Obstfeld put it in the magnificent, awe-inspiring Foundations of International Macroeconomics…,’The behavior of dynamically inefficient economies wreaks havoc with much of our intuition about the laws of economics.’ Put more bluntly, dynamic inefficiency makes a large part of macroeconomics worthless. Financial markets are in a sense ahead of academic macroeconomics in responding: traditional ‘fundamentals’ have now largely been transformed into one overarching ‘fundamental’: the assessment of solvency. As a result, markets are exhibiting binary behavior (‘risk-on’ or ‘risk-off’). Mathematically, dynamic inefficiency, bubbles and Ponzi games are linked very closely together. The world economy has become a collection of Ponzi games. And which country’s assets constitute a ‘safe haven’ is largely a question of whether one country’s Ponzi game can attract new participants (or even hold on to existing ones) longer than another’s.”
Bernard Connolly1

Bernard Connolly has never been one to mince words. In 1997, Mr. Connolly published The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe’s Money which featured an illustration of a young cherub perched atop a monument bearing the initials “ERM” and urinating on a map of Europe. That image pretty much summed up Mr. Connolly’s Eurosceptic views, and he remains as dubious today about the prospects for success of the European experiment as he did 15 years ago. While Europe is hardly the only region running a Ponzi game, it is certainly running the Ponzi game that is closest to coming apart. As Mr. Connolly accurately describes it, “what deters new participants in a Ponzi game is not an accumulation of debt but a destruction of wealth, or more accurately, a realization that the wealth supposedly backing debt is illusory….if the wealth of debtors is illusory, the wealth of creditors must also be illusory.” I am unaware of anyone who believes that countries such as Greece or Portugal or Spain are in a position to service or repay their debts. It must be acknowledged that these countries’ economies are incapable of generating sufficient income to do so.

For that reason, as Mr. Connolly writes, “the suggestions often put forward (largely driven by interpretations of Rogoff-Reinhart) that debt forgiveness or a ‘bit more inflation’ to reduce the real burden of debts can get the world out of the mess are quite wrong. The underlying problem is dynamic inefficiency, which reduces future consumption possibilities; and this in turn means that much of recent and current fixed capital formation…has been based on excessively optimistic excessively optimistic expectations of future demand.” In other words, whatever schemes the European Central Bank (ECB) may cook up over the next few months will only prove short-term liquidity relief to what are long-term insolvency problems. Like any Ponzi scheme, the last money in is going to be hurt the worst when the charade comes to an end. In the meantime, investors proceed at their own risk.

Europe

The ECB meets on September 6, at which time it could announce another interest rate cut as well as release further details of its planned repurchases of Spanish and Italian debt through the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). No action will be taken at that meeting with respect to the debt repurchases, however, because everyone is waiting for the ruling of the German Constitutional Court on September 12.

The Court is not being asked to make a final determination on the question of whether the ESM violates the German Constitution. Rather, the September 12 ruling is limited to requests for an emergency injunction that would place German ratification of the ESM on hold until the Court decides the cases in full. A final verdict is not expected until sometime in 2013. According to legal experts, however, the Court chose to hear the case through an unusual procedure that renders it unlikely that the final ruling will deviate significantly from its September ruling. Rather than follow the normal procedure involved when a claimant is asking for a preliminary injunction, the Court chose a different path. Normally, the Court would evaluate the injunction question without ruling on the substantive issue. It would determine whether the complaint describes conduct that, if proven, poses an immediate and direct threat to Germany’s Constitution. The Court would grant an injunction only if it found not only that such a threat existed but that the potential constitutional violation outweighs the consequences of delaying a final decision.

In this case, however, the Court decided to adopt a different procedure – one that allows it to decide the injunction question while also making a preliminary judgment on whether the ESM is consistent with the German constitution. Such a procedure renders it unlikely that the Court will make a preliminary finding of constitutionality and then later reverse it. For that reason, the September ruling will be considered dispositive. What is unusual here is that the Court could permit Germany to enter into the ESM without rendering a final ruling. Depending on precisely how the Court frames its decision, this may provide sufficient certainty for the financial markets. Then again, it may not.

Many observers believe that the Court will issue a finding of constitutionality coupled with a series of conditions designed to preserve German fiscal sovereignty. It may add those conditions the requirement that the stability of the euro currency be enhanced by the ESM. While I received my legal training in the United States and therefore hardly qualify as a German constitutional expert, I remain concerned that matters may become muddled when the German Constitutional Court rules.

First, Germany is already dancing very close to the line set by the Constitutional Court regarding limits on its economic sovereignty. Germany is facing a bill that is likely to be in the trillions of euros whether or not the EU survives. It will either be bailing out its banks from their losses on holdings of defaulted Greek, Portuguese, Spanish and even Italian debt, or continue writing checks into what is basically a black hole of Target2 and ECB obligations to keep the European enterprise afloat. Either scenario, it seems to me, could be construed as ceding of its fiscal affairs. The issue will come down to whether German politicians will be willing to consciously decide to employ German resources to support other nations. The question is how conscious such a decision can actually be. There is a decision between “ceding” fiscal control and consciously deciding that devoting enormous amounts of Germany’s economic resources to supporting other countries is in Germany’s economic interest. There can be little question that such decisions have a great bearing on what the Court has previously described as “fundamental fiscal decisions on revenue and expenditure.” But whether such transfers constitute a “ceding” of control over such fiscal matters is something that only the Constitutional Court can determine.

The current President of the Court, Prof. Dr. Andreas Vosskule, has already expressed his view that the parameters of Germany’s Constitution are close to being exhausted. If he and his brethren view the ESM as a step too far in terms of transferring the Bundestag’s budgetary authority to the European Parliament, they could go so far as to effectively require a constitutional amendment in order for Germany to lend further support to ECB efforts to prop up Spain and Italy. A decision like that would throw Europe into chaos. At the very least, it would not be unreasonable to expect for the Court to set a high bar on the procedural steps that the German Parliament must follow in order to exert control over the country’s fiscal affairs and prevent them from being overly influenced by the demands of the EU. Germany already requires parliamentary pre-approval of each and every ESM financing program, a requirement not found in other EU countries. The Court could require even further parliamentary control as a condition of further German support.

The formation of the ESM has ripened these issues for decision at the Court. But the conditions that raise questions about whether Germany is already dangerously close to violating the Court’s prior rulings have been building steadily as economic conditions throughout the region have deteriorated. Bernard Connolly tells it like it is: “In the case of the [European Union] Ponzi game, the crisis has arisen because only one conceivable new participant can prevent collapse: the German taxpayer (and German demographics mean there will be fewer German taxpayers in the future, even if current taxpayers were to accept the role of the ‘bigger fool’).” If Germany has not reached the limits of the Constitutional Court’s rulings already, the ESM may push it right up to the line. We live in an investment world characterized by fat tails, which is investment parlance for unlikely outcomes that have a disproportionately large impact on investment returns. The September 12 ruling by the German Constitutional Court has the potential to be one of those fat tail events.

Figure 1
Spanish Banks
Spanish Banks


1. Bernard Connolly, “Rethinking the Rogoff-Reinhart Thesis,” in The International Economy, Summer 2012, p.48.