Hugo Dixon

The European Central Bank’s bond-buying scheme has bought Spain and Italy time to stabilise their finances. But if they drag their heels, the market will sniff them out. It will then be almost impossible to come up with another scheme to rescue the euro zone’s two large problem children and, with them, the single currency.

Mario Draghi’s promise in late July to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro has already had a dramatic impact on Madrid’s and Rome’s borrowing costs. Ten-year bond yields, which peaked at 7.6 percent and 6.6 percent respectively a few days before the ECB president made his first comments, had collapsed to 5.7 percent and 5.1 percent on Sept. 7.

Most of the decline came before Draghi spelt out last Thursday the details of how the plan will work. What makes the scheme powerful is that the ECB has not set any cap to the amount of sovereign bonds it will buy in the market. The central bank’s financial firepower is theoretically unlimited, whereas the euro zone governments’ own bailout funds do not have enough money to rescue both Spain and Italy.

But the new type of intervention, christened “Outright Monetary Transactions”, has three important limitations.

First, the ECB will only buy a country’s bonds if its government agrees to a bailout programme with the euro zone, and sticks to “strict and effective” conditions detailed in such a deal. Second, the central bank will focus its purchases on bonds with a maturity of one to three years. Finally, Draghi has not specified how much he wants to drive down Madrid’s and Rome’s borrowing costs.

This fine print makes sense. But it also means that there is no free lunch. While the ECB seems unlikely to dream up new economic reforms for Spain and Italy, it will probably want their governments to put more precise time frames around what they are already supposed to be doing. The involvement of the International Monetary Fund, which has a somewhat unfounded reputation as a bogeyman, will also be sought. No wonder neither Spain’s Mariano Rajoy nor Italy’s Mario Monti is rushing to take advantage of the scheme.

Meanwhile, the ECB’s focus on short-term bonds means that Madrid and Rome would have to find some other way of issuing long-term debt – which accounts for 66 percent and 62 percent of outstanding debt respectively. If they lost access to the markets, the zone’s bailout funds would have to ride to the rescue. But they still wouldn’t have enough money for both countries.

What’s more, Spain’s and Italy’s borrowing costs are still too high for comfort. The ECB’s main justification for bond-buying is that investors are unfairly punishing them because of fears that the euro will break up. But it also recognises that the spread between their bond yields and Germany’s 1.5 percent 10-year borrowing costs is only partly due to such “convertibility risk”. It is also because of bad economic policies.

While there aren’t any scientific measures of convertibility risk, it seems like the bulk of it has disappeared since Draghi’s comments in late July. A reasonable guesstimate is that the risk of euro breakup might still be inflating Spanish yields by 1 percentage point and Italian ones by perhaps 0.75 percentage points. If the ECB used those numbers to guide its bond-buying programme, 10-year borrowing costs would drop to 4.7 percent and 4.4 percent respectively. To fall further, the countries would need to take more action themselves.

Although investors are currently relatively bullish about Spain and Italy, they are notoriously fickle. Rajoy and Monti should remember how the good mood, engineered at the start of the year by the ECB’s 1 trillion euros of cheap long-term loans to the zone’s banks, vanished with the spring. What’s more, both are facing tougher political challenges than they did at the start of the year when they were enjoying their honeymoons as new prime ministers. Each of their economies has declined this year and will continue to do so next year – shrinking roughly 5 percent over the two-year period, according to Citigroup.

For all these reasons, it is vital that Rajoy and Monti don’t dawdle. Assuming the German constitutional court this week backs the creation of the European Stability Mechanism, the zone’s permanent bailout fund, the Spanish prime minister should apply immediately for a programme.

Italy, a rich country, should still be able to avoid a bailout. But to do so it needs to cut its public debt, ideally with a vigorous privatisation programme and the creation of a wealth tax. With elections due next April and no guarantee that an effective government can be formed thereafter, there is only a tiny window for action. Monti’s technocratic government needs to jump through it.

The ECB has put its credibility on the line with its new bond-buying plan. Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, has attacked it on the grounds that it has come close to breaking treaty provisions banning the ECB from bailing out governments. For now, Draghi can withstand the criticism, as long as Angela Merkel keeps backing him. But if Rajoy and Monti don’t move fast, the ECB’s magic will wear off. And if its medicine then fails, it will be hard to conjure up the political will for an even more powerful concoction.

The euro crisis is to a great extent a confidence crisis. Sure, there are big underlying problems such as excessive debt and lack of competitiveness in the peripheral economies. But these can be addressed and, to some extent, this is happening already. Meanwhile, a quick fix for the confidence crisis is needed.

The harsh medicine of reform is required but is undermining confidence on multiple levels. Businesses, bankers, ordinary citizens and politicians are losing faith in both the immediate economic future and the whole single-currency project. That is creating interconnected vicious spirals.

The twin epicentres of the crisis are Spain and Italy. The boost they received from last month’s euro zone summit has been more than wiped out. Spanish 10-year bond yields equalled their euro-era record of 7.3 percent on July 20; Italy’s had also rebounded to a slightly less terrifying but still worrying 6.2 percent.

As ever, the explanation is that the summiteers came up with only a partial solution and even that was hedged with caveats. Although the euro zone will probably inject capital into Spain’s bust banks, relieving Madrid of the cost of doing so, the path will be tortuous. Meanwhile, a scheme which could help Italy finance its debt will come with strings attached – and there still isn’t enough money in the euro zone’s bailout fund to do this for more than a short time.

The two countries’ high bond yields aren’t just a thermometer of how sick they are. They push up the cost of capital for everybody in Spain and Italy, while sowing doubts about whether the whole show can be kept on the road. Capital flight continues at an alarming rate, especially in Spain. The so-called Target 2 imbalances, which measure the credits and debits of national central banks within the euro zone, are a good proxy for this. Spain’s Target 2 debt had grown to 408 billion euros at the end of June, up from 303 billion only two months earlier. The Italian one was roughly stable but still high at 272 billion euros.

The loss of confidence is harming the economy. Spain’s GDP is expected to shrink by 2.1 percent this year and a further 3.1 percent next year, according to Citigroup, one of the more pessimistic forecasters. The prospects for Italy are not much better: a predicted 2.6 percent decline this year followed by 2 percent next year.

Shrinking economies are, in turn, pushing up debt/GDP ratios. Citigroup expects Spain’s to jump from 69 percent at the end of last year to 101 percent at the end of 2013, in part because of the cost of bailing out its banks, while Italy’s will shoot up from 120 percent to 135 percent. These eye-popping numbers then reinforce anxiety in the markets.

All of this is having a corrosive effect on the political landscape. In Italy, the situation is especially precarious as Mario Monti, the technocratic prime minister, has repeatedly said he will resign after next spring’s elections. The centre-left Democratic Party, which is leading in the opinion polls, is still committed to the euro. But the second and third most popular political groups – the Five Star movement led by comedian Beppe Grillo, and Silvio Berlusconi’s PdL – are either outright eurosceptics or toying with becoming so.

The situation is slightly better in Spain because Mariano Rajoy has a solid majority and doesn’t officially have to face the electorate for three and a half years. But hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets last week to protest against the latest austerity measures. Pundits are starting to speculate that Rajoy may not last his full term. And if the Italian and Spanish governments can’t carry their people with them along the reform path, the fear is that Germany may no longer support them.

High borrowing costs, capital flight, and economic and political weakness: to escape this vortex, the immediate priority is to get Spain’s and Italy’s bond yields back down. The goal should be to cut borrowing costs below 5 percent – a level that would no longer be that worrying. While most of the ways of doing this have been vetoed by Germany, at least two haven’t.

One is to leverage up the European Stabilisation Mechanism, the region’s bailout fund, so that it has enough money to fund both Madrid and Rome. Neither Germany nor the European Central Bank want to let the ESM borrow money from the ECB itself. But what about lifting the cap on how much it can borrow from the market?

Another option would be for the core countries, led by Germany and France, to subsidise Spain’s and Italy’s interest rates directly – giving back to the southern Europeans part of the benefit they are enjoying from their own extremely low borrowing costs. If they agreed to close half the gap between the core and the periphery, such a scheme would cost around 75 billion euros over seven years, according to a Breakingviews’ calculation. An interest-rate subsidy would also give markets the confidence that Madrid and Rome would be able to finance their debts and so could further lower their borrowing costs.

There would, of course, have to be conditions. In Italy, Monti needs to embark on a second wave of reforms. In particular, he should launch a mass multi-year privatisation programme and a big one-off wealth tax to cut Italy’s debt. But after Spain’s recent plan to clean up its banking sector and further tighten its belt, there is little more to be asked of it.

Germany is right to insist on reforms. But it should balance the stick with a bigger carrot. Otherwise, the single currency from which it benefits so much could collapse.

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. “Upon waking, the dinosaur was still there.”

This extremely short story by Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso sums up the state of play on the euro crisis. Last week’s summit took important steps to stop the immediate panic. But the big economies of Italy and Spain are shrinking and there is no agreed long-term vision for the zone. In other words, the crisis is still there.

The summit’s decisions are not to be sniffed at. The agreement that the euro zone’s bailout fund should, in time, be able to recapitalise banks directly rather than via national governments will help break the so-called doom loop binding troubled lenders and troubled governments. That is a shot in the arm for both Spain and Ireland. Meanwhile, unleashing the bailout fund to stabilise sovereign bond markets could stop Rome’s and Madrid’s bond yields rising to unsustainable levels.

Insofar as this restores investors’ confidence, Spain and Italy could avoid the need to obtain a full bailout or restructure their debts. And Ireland, which is in a full bailout programme, could exit that and fund itself in the market again.

The immediate market reaction on Friday was positive. The yield on 10-year bonds fell: for Spain from 6.9 percent to 6.3 percent, for Italy from 6.2 percent to 5.8 percent and for Ireland from 7.1 percent to 6.4 percent. But these rates are still high. And, with the exception of Ireland, Friday’s market movements only take prices back to where they were in May.

What’s more, as the details of Friday’s agreement are picked over, some of the market euphoria may well fade. After all, Germany, the zone’s paymaster, hasn’t written a blank cheque.

Take the bank recapitalisation plan. Madrid is planning to inject up to 100 billion euros into its banks and Dublin has already sunk 64 billion euros into its lenders. The big question is whether the euro zone will reimburse them the full amount invested, given that the stakes in the banks aren’t worth as much. That seems unlikely. But if the full sum isn’t paid, the debt relief for Spain and Ireland may not be as big as some are hoping.

Or look at the market stabilisation mechanism. The euro zone bailout fund’s resources are limited, so it might not be able to keep Italian and Spanish borrowing costs down in the long run. What’s more, to access this mechanism, a country would have to agree to a memorandum of understanding setting out its policy commitments to reform its economy. This means that there will still be some stigma attached to the scheme – which probably explains why Rome and Madrid aren’t rushing to sign up.

To point out that Germany’s Angela Merkel hasn’t agreed a blank cheque is not to criticise the summit compromise. It is essential that Italy’s Mario Monti and Spain’s Mariano Rajoy take further measures to restore their countries’ competitiveness. A second wave of reforms is needed, but both prime ministers have lost momentum in recent months. Money for nothing will take away pressure to do more.

However, the continued uncertainty about exactly how bank bailouts and market stabilisation will work means that the summit did not produce a neat package. As the loose ends are tied up, there could be further wrangling that unnerves investors.

Meanwhile, GDP in both Italy and Spain are continuing to shrink. This means that they won’t hit their deficit reduction targets and that their debts and unemployment will rise further. The summit’s 120 billion euro growth pact isn’t likely to move the needle. More may need to be done to shore up growth. One obvious suggestion would be still looser monetary policy from the European Central Bank.

Recession also has political consequences, especially in Italy, where elections are due next spring at the latest. Both Beppe Grillo, a comedian whose populist Cinque Stelle movement has come from virtually nowhere to 20 percent in the opinion polls in recent months, and Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister, are playing the eurosceptic card. In the circumstances, Monti’s technocratic government will struggle to gain political support for any more reforms. Investors and Italy’s euro partners will, in turn, worry about what comes after him.

The euro zone leaders also agreed, in principle, on the first step towards a long-term vision for the region: the creation of a single banking supervisor “involving the ECB”. If this cleans up the mess in large parts of the European financial system, it will be good. But some countries will not wish to surrender control over their banks to a centralised authority and so it is quite possible that some messy fudge will emerge.

If the question of a single banking supervisor is likely to be subject to future disputes, even more disagreement can be expected over whether there should be a full political and fiscal union. Some countries like Germany want much more common decision making, but others fear the loss of sovereignty. Meanwhile, many weaker nations want to pool their debts – an idea rightly rejected by Merkel.

Europe’s people are not ready for full political union. So the best solution would be to keep the loss of sovereignty and debt-sharing down to the minimum. But the summit kicked these big issues into touch.

The dinosaur is less terrifying than it was a few weeks ago. But it is still there.

At a dinner in Madrid earlier this month, the main complaint about Mariano Rajoy was that the new prime minister was treating the electorate like children. Many of the guests, supporters of Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP), understood that Spain had to cut its fiscal deficit and restore its competitiveness. But they didn’t like the fact that the prime minister hadn’t been frank about his plans.

In advance of last November’s general election, Rajoy said he wouldn’t raise taxes, make it cheaper to fire people or cut the welfare state. But he has now done the first two. After this week’s election in Andalusia, Spain’s largest region, he is expected to do the last.

Rajoy’s camp doesn’t see any problem in failing to be upfront. It would have been foolish to talk too much about austerity in the general election campaign as that might have frightened the voters. For the same reason, it would be foolish to tell them about reforming the welfare state in advance of the Andalusia election.

In the long run, the failure to treat the population like adults could cause trouble. But in the short run, the strategy has paid off. The socialist party lost nearly 40 percent of its votes in the general election, not least because it had done a poor job in government. It is now expected to lose control of Andalusia, its last main bastion, according to an opinion poll by Metroscopia.

Rajoy has already used the absence of any serious opposition – even a general strike called for next week doesn’t pose much threat – to push through one batch of reforms. The most important is of the labour market. He has made it cheaper for companies to fire people and largely dismantled the nationwide system of collective bargaining. The net effect will be that wages, which rose rapidly during the early years of the single currency, will fall – so restoring Spain’s competitiveness.

Between end 1998 and end 2009, Spain’s unit labour costs rose 38 percent, compared to 23 percent for the euro zone as a whole. In the past two years, they have come down 4 percent. The latest labour reforms could cut wages another 5 percent this year, according to Fernando Fernandez, economics professor at Madrid’s IE Business School. If the trend continues for another year or so, Spain will no longer be out of kilter with its euro peers.

The other main reform – cleaning up toxic loans from banks’ balance sheets following the country’s real-estate bubble – has had more mixed reviews. The government has told the industry to take provisions and stash away capital to the tune of 50 billion euros. While the number sounds high, the detailed rules mean many banks won’t need to raise capital and some of the rest could have nearly two years to do so. The government itself has been reluctant to put any more of its own money into banks. So it is trying to push weak banks into the arms of stronger ones and fill any capital shortfalls with guarantees from an underfunded deposit insurance scheme rather than with real cash.

The litmus test of whether this financial jiggery-pokery works will be whether banks are able to borrow in the markets and are then willing to support economic recovery by lending to businesses and consumers. There are some positive signs: Santander last week issued 1 billion euros in five-year senior debt. But most of the industry is still relying on handouts from the European Central Bank.

Rajoy’s second blast of reforms will be about putting the public finances onto a sustainable basis. In 2011, the budget deficit hit 8.5 percent of gross domestic product. Spain last week reached a deal with its euro zone partners to cut it to 5.3 percent this year. Although this is not as severe as the 4.4 percent originally pledged, it will still constitute a severe squeeze. What’s more, the government remains committed to bring the deficit down to 3 percent next year.

The prime minister has already given some ideas about what he will do. Income taxes were raised and some spending cut in an emergency budget just before the New Year. Rajoy is also putting in place a straitjacket to control the borrowing of the country’s profligate regional governments. If he wins this week’s Andalusia election, he will be in an even better position to impose his will as the vast majority of the regions will then be under the PP’s control.

But more will be needed. The regions, which are responsible for education and healthcare, will probably be allowed to charge people for part of the cost. And Rajoy will have to cut the number of public-sector employees and increase taxes further in next week’s budget.

Economically, this is logical. The concern is that Rajoy’s failure to be frank with the electorate could increase its cynicism. The people already have little trust in politicians of all stripes. Witness last year’s indignado movement, when hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets to complain.

This won’t matter if the economy, which the government expects to shrink 1.7 percent this year, stabilises next year. But what if GDP keeps shrinking, unemployment (now 23 percent) continues rising and the deficit remains stubbornly high? Spain would face renewed bond market jitters and further pressure from its euro partners to cut its deficit. Rajoy would then have to sell another dose of austerity to voters that wouldn’t believe him. Having treated them like kids, they might even throw a tantrum.

When confidence in a regime’s permanence is shaken, it can collapse rapidly. The fear or hope of change alters people’s behavior in ways which make that change more likely. This applies to both political regimes such as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and economic regimes such as the euro.

Fear that the single currency may break up now risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Banks and investors are beginning to act as if the single currency might fall apart. Politicians and the European Central Bank need to restore belief that the single currency is here to stay. Otherwise, it could unravel pretty fast.

Until a few weeks ago, the idea that the euro wouldn’t survive the current debt crisis was a fringe view. Since the euro summit on Oct. 26-27, it has become a mainstream scenario. So much so that last week risk premiums on the bonds of even triple-A rated countries such as France and Austria rose to record levels, while Spain became the latest country to be sucked into the danger zone.

The summit itself made two technical decisions which have had damaging, unintended consequences. First, banks underwent a stress test that marked their sovereign bond exposures to market whereas previously regulators maintained the fiction that these positions were risk-free. This meant that lenders suddenly had to start holding capital to back their sovereign debt investments. Not surprisingly, they have become more reluctant to buy bonds. This, in turn, has made it harder for governments to fund themselves.

Second, the summit decided to strong-arm the banks into agreeing to a “voluntary” debt restructuring for Greece. Because the deal is supposedly voluntary, credit default swaps (CDS) – a type of insurance policy that pays out if an entity goes bust – won’t be triggered. This arm-twisting has convinced lenders that CDSs are a useless way of hedging the risk of investing in euro zone government bonds. Without a hedge, many prefer not to hold the bonds at all – again making it harder for states to fund themselves.

After the summit, things went from bad to worse with Greece’s disastrous plan to call a referendum on its latest bailout plan. That idea was withdrawn – but not before Germany and France suggested that Athens might need to be kicked out of the euro unless it came to heel. The snag is that it would be very hard to isolate the Greeks. If one country could leave the single currency, why not two, three or all 17?

As investors thought about the possibility of a euro break-up, they started factoring in currency risk. Under such a scenario, the new Greek drachma would plummet in value; the new Italian lira and Spanish peseta would also take a tumble; even the new French franc would depreciate versus a vibrant new Deutsche Mark. That gave the market another reason to sell pretty much every non-German government bond – again making it harder for those states to fund themselves.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, banks are also suffering from a liquidity squeeze. It’s not just investors who are getting jittery about putting their money in banks; lenders are reluctant to lend to each other because they are not totally sure that their peers will survive.

Banks outside the euro zone are also cutting their lines of credit to those inside the zone. The big four UK banks cut interbank loans by around a quarter in the three months to end September, according to data compiled by the Financial Times. Meanwhile, the United States is about to embark on a new stress tests of its lenders. This will include contingency planning against further disruptions in Europe. It wouldn’t be surprising if this provoked American banks to cut their exposure to their euro counterparts, further exacerbating their funding problems.

These vicious spirals have drowned out the good news on the political front. Italy, Greece and now Spain have new prime ministers, all of whom seem intent on cutting debts and making their economies fitter. But they will struggle to reduce their borrowing costs unless investors can be convinced that the euro is here to stay.

The one thing that probably would restore confidence is if the ECB found some way of supporting governments that were pursuing sensible policies. But the central bank itself and Germany, the euro zone’s main paymaster, have so far resisted this. In part, this is because they think governments won’t have a strong incentive to reform if they are bailed out too easily.

The logic of making countries sweat so that they address problems they have shirked for years, and sometimes decades, is a good one. But the ECB and Germany should remember that carrots are useful incentives, as well as sticks – and, if they don’t provide the carrot soon, the euro may not survive.