Tag Archives: eurosystem

TARGET2 And Capital Outflows

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This is a note by Eladio Febrero Panos sent to me by Sergio Cesarrato.

by Eladio Febrero Paños

Area de Teoria Economica, Facultad de Economicas, UCLM Pza Universidad no. 1, 02071 Albacete, Spain

Let us assume the following initial situation.

There are two private banks, one in Spain (SPB) and another one in Germany (GPB); we have also two central banks (BdE for Spain and Buba for Germany). For simplicity’s sake, we omit the ECB which connects them through the TARGET2 (T2) system.

Imagine the following balance sheets which (I hope) are self evident:

This figure accounts for the import of a commodity made in Germany by a Spanish agent (amounting to 200 monetary units, m.u. onwards). This import generated a deposit which was then “lent” by GPB to SPB. With this loan, T2 claims and liabilities cancelled out.

Also, we are assuming a compulsory reserve system, with a reserve coefficient of 10% on collected deposits. This is an overdraft system (Lavoie[1] has described this very often), so that each central bank lends to private banks in its jurisdiction the reserves that the former requires the latter to hold.

I think that, up to this point there is nothing controversial.

Next, we shall assume that GPB does not wish to roll over its loan to SPB because whatever reason. Consequently, GPB prefers to bring money at home.

How can this be done, if SPB does not have enough reserves? There are two alternatives.

In the first one, SPB would try to sell its public debt (PD). This option has at least two problems.

Firstly, even if SPB sells all its PD it will not obtain proceeds enough to cancel the loan from GPB.

Secondly, the price of PD would plummet and this is a problem for the implementation of monetary policy:

  • PD is collateral when borrowing in the interbank market; if its value falls SPB would have it harder to borrow there; and consequently, the credit supply would shrink.
  • the yield of PD is the reference when calculating the interest rate on loans to solvent borrowers; if the price of PD plummets its yield skyrockets. This would affect negatively to the credit market;
  • there is a balance sheet effect: if the value of PD falls, SPB’s balance size shrinks because part of its assets has a lower value; if its liabilities remain the same, SPB’s equity would shrink as well and this would lead to less credits.

The central bank aims at preventing this situation (here). Because of this, it will provide SPB with liquidity. And here we have the second alternative.

The BdE will lend to SPB, either through the marginal lending facility, providing a loan, or through a MRO / LTRO (for our discussion this does not matter).  If it makes a MRO, we shall have:

The ECB, through peripheral NCBs (national central banks) is providing liquidity to make it possible for German investors (and also peripheral ones) to carry their money to a safe harbor (in Germany, but also Luxembourg). T2 imbalances are the consequence of this monetary policy.

It should be noted that this is not a specific policy aiming at financing a current account imbalance in the periphery (here). It is not a fiscal policy, as Sinn has claimed so often.

It is an automatic policy, which makes it possible the payment system to run smoothly, something which is mandatory for the ECB.

Contrary to Sinn who argues as if the EMU is a club of countries with a fixed exchange regime, the EMU is a monetary union. In the EMU, countries are for the union like regions or autonomous communities for a nation-state. If you move your savings from a deposit in Banca San Paolo to Unicredit, and the former has no reserves deposited in the Banca d’Italia, the latter would create money and then credit the reserve account of Unicredit so your money would be there now. In its turn Banca d’Italia would acquire a claim on Banca San Paolo. If the latter has a solvency problem, then Banca d’Italia would force it to disappear (after selling its assets). If it has just a liquidity problem, Banca d’Italia probably would let it continue operating and wait until it can pay back its debt.

It should be noted that if Banca d’Italia in the example just above, or the European System of Central Banks (in this discussion on T2) does not provide with liquidity the banking system, it would collapse: there would be a bank run and the whole economic system would have very serious problems.

It is in this sense that T2 imbalances are the consequence and not the cause of the problems within the EMU.

It should be noted also that if, instead of having a central bank in Spain and another one in Germany, but just one for the whole EMU, T2 claims and liabilities would cancel out.

Also, you will find here statistical information about the relation between MRO and T2 for Spain, drawn from the Banco de España website (here and here in epigraph no. 8.1 if you click on ‘Series temporalesdel cuadro 8.1, you will download an excel file with the numerical information included in the pdf file). There you will see that there is a nice correlation between MRO and T2 imbalances during the last year or so (probably the correlation improves if you add LTRO to MRO).

References

  1. Marc Lavoie, A Primer On Endogenous Credit-Money in Modern Theories Of Money – The Nature And Role Of Money In Capiatlist Economies, Edward Elgar, 2003, ed. Louis-Philippe Rochon and Sergio Rossi. (Google Books Link)

Is Intra-Eurosystem Debt Unconstitutional?

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There’s an interesting conversation between JKH and Marshall Auerback here on the constitutionality of TARGET2 balances of the NCBs of the Euro Area.

Rather than intervene in the comments, I thought I will let them exchange comments because I am not sure why Marshall Auerback thinks these are unconstitutional and more generally where he is headed in his series of posts. Links from Robert M Wuner who collects all the articles on TARGET.

The mechanics of TARGET2 are explained quite well in this ECB legal document GUIDELINE OF THE EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK of 30 December 2005 on a Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross settlement Express Transfer system (TARGET)

It cannot be otherwise!

I had a comment by Alea (@Alea_) and since I don’t publish comments, I am posting it here. It is the opposite of what I thought.

Your guideline refers to TARGET and has been repealed. There aren’t any unlimited and uncollateralised credit facility between NCBs under TARGET2.

Ramanan here. Thanks Alea for commenting.

This seems right.

The ECB site for ECB/2007/2 has this:

I am still reading ECB/2007/2 and wonder how it changed it and if there is any dope on this – such as setting limits on TARGET2 flows.

According to Article 15 of Section IV of the ECB/2007/2, interlinking provisions of ECB/2005/16 continue to hold.

Hence it seems NCBs and the ECB indeed have unlimited and uncollateralised credit facility with each other!

Downplaying TARGET2 Imbalances

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Beate Reszat has written a very nice article on TARGET2 Target2 – Q&A which should be read by anyone interested. The article seems to be in response to a speech by George Soros earlier this month in Italy. The link appears in her post and the relevant section of the transcript quoted.

Although it is a very informative article, I think the writer gives a misleading picture by disagreeing with George Soros.

For a background, the whole debate started when a German Professor Hans-Werner Sinn wrote an article The ECB’s Stealth Bailout which led to a series of attacks from academicians to bankers to central banks seriously questioning Sinn. Sinn’s arguments are full of errors but this brought into focus the TARGET2 claims of creditor nations’ NCBs and the risks that this asset may “disappear”.

Critics of Sinn learned the TARGET system and to my surprise, their description had a lot of features on money endogeneity – surprising since most of these writers err on describing one pole (of the two poles) of money endogeneity – that between banks and their central bank.

In the end, the critics claimed victory – although powerful persons such as George Soros and Jen Weidmann of Bundesbank understood and saw the situation slightly differently. Even Martin Wolf who has differences with Weidmann on the German economic strategy – rightly in my view – agrees that it may lead to losses to Germany in case of debtor nations leaving the Euro Area.

(By the way this link by Robert M Wuner has the complete list of articles on the TARGET2 debate).

Now, I have myself written a set of articles on this: The Eurosystem: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, & Part 5.

On the specific issue about creditor nations taking a loss see this post: Who Is Germany and Deutsche Bundesbank’s TARGET2 Claims.

While it is difficult to summarize the whole debate, the point which comes to mind is that while those who have written about the TARGET2 system in a more technically correct way (central bank articles, banks’ research publications, academicians), they are seriously misleading. Some don’t see it while – in my opinion – the Eurosystem authors see it and downplay the risks.

So here’s from Beate’s article:

If the country in question refrains from staying connected to Target2 and, at the same time, is abandoning the ECB – in my understanding (but we must ask the jurists to find out) its paid-up capital will have to be returned plus its share of profit, or minus its share of loss according to a consolidated closing balance sheet and profit and loss statement.

Now this is serious underplay. She concludes:

The way the issue of Target2 balances is discussed in public is most regrettable. The ever new records of unmanageable bilateral debt allegedly heaping up in the system arouse fears which are wholly unreasonable and stand in the way to finding a viable crisis solution. Two points should be kept in mind: Monetary policy matters such as the creation of central bank money must not be confused with the process of payment and settlement of central bank money, and intra-group payment flows as part of the normal business of the system must not be confused with profits and losses.

At closer inspection, the €2 trillion debt scenario conjured up by some observers in an utterly irresponsible way is evaporating into thin air and the euro crisis – although still a very serious problem and a big challenge – appears as one that probably can be handled.

The error in analysis such as this is that of not thinking of “money” as simultaneously as an asset and a liability.

It is best to think of the creditor nations as a whole so that the complication of “capital key” can be avoided. In my post Who Is Germany I argue that the exit of debtor members of the Euro Area will lead to losses for the creditor nations because the debtor nations will not be able to pay the Euro-denominated TARGET2 liabilities. This appears via a direct loss on the central banks’ balance sheet. And since this is a loss of the balance sheet of a nation (or a group of nations as a whole), it is plainly incorrect to argue that it does not matter or that Soros is wrong. The complication of “capital key” is a bit of a sideshow – if Germany’s losses are less than its TARGET2 claims, other NCBs lose. It is true that the Bundesbank may be capitalized by the German government – in case – but no amount of domestic transaction can change the external assets (of Germany as a whole). The fact that it is a loss to Germany can be seen by looking at the International Investment Position. If the Bundebank loses its TARGET claims, it is a loss for the whole nation. As the chapter 7 of the IMF’s Balance Of Payments And International Investment Position Manual (BPM6) says:

The IIP is a subset of the national balance sheet. The net IIP plus the value of nonfinancial assets equals the net worth of the economy, which is the balancing item of the national balance sheet.

In fact, George Soros’ argument is that since exits of debtor nations from the Euro Area will lead to serious losses to creditor nations, this has the effect of forcing the latter – especially Germany – to do something and in fact in leading them to move toward higher integration! (as a title of his recent article The Accidental Empire from Project Syndicate suggests).

To the point of Beate Reszat’s dislike for the phrase – “evaporating in thin air”, the BPM6 and the 2008 SNA use similar terminology – “appearance and disappearance of assets”!

Peter Garber From 1998 On TARGET

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In exchange rate agreements and arrangements such as the ERM I and II, central banks would risk running out of foreign reserves in case of a speculative attack on the currency. They may commit to each other on defending the exchange rate but in extreme cases, the agreements may lose their significance.

When I saw first this guideline on the ECB Website on TARGET (on NCBs and the ECB providing unlimited and uncollateralized credit facility to each other) – a couple of years back – I was a bit shocked but later seemed to make sense:

In return, the Euro Area member nations had to irrevocably lock in exchange rates as per this nice article on TARGET by Peter Garber in 1998: Notes On The Role Of TARGET In A Stage III Crisis (h/t Tom Hickey). Garber also has another interesting article (a special report from Deutsche Bank) The Mechanics Of Intra Euro Capital Flight, December 2010.

According to Garber in the previously existing Very Short Term Financing Facility (VSTFF), central bank of the nation seeing private inflows theoretically has to provide unlimited credit to the central bank of the nation seeing private outflows.

The VSTFF is a facility to be used if serious intervention is necessary to preserve official bilateral bands in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Under the Basle-Nyborg agreement, the weak currency central bank is to intervene in the exchange markets to prevent the exchange rate from breaching the band. The strong currency central bank is responsible for providing credit to the weak currency central bank through the VSTFF, theoretically in unlimited amounts but in fact limited by the effect on the strong currency central bank’s monetary policy.

More in the paper. Of course, Garber is incorrect in assuming that the central bank providing credit loses control of its monetary policy. (Expect a future post on Sterilization). Anyway interesting paper – especially on how capital flight from the “periphery” before a breakup can lead to huge losses for the creditor Euro Area nations.

Spanish Banks, Banco de España & TARGET2

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In two big operations in December and February, the Eurosystem lent around €1tn to banks in the Euro Area:

(click to expand, source: ECB)

Spanish banks it seems borrowed around €315bn (gross) as per the recently the Banco de España released statistic Financing In The Eurosystem (April 2012):

(click to expand)

Due to the continuing capital flight out of Spain, the TARGET2 liabilities of Banco de España increased in April and averaged €284.5bn in the month. The flow equivalent in the balance-of-payments language may be called the accommodating item.

Deutsche Bundesbank’s TARGET2 Claims: Again!

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At the risk of boring readers, here’s Bundesbank’s TARGET2 claims again from its March 2012 Monthly Report. Cannot find the English version but the translation is below the first figure (with old data). This increased to almost €560bn at the end of February despite ease in financial market conditions in the Euro Area!

(click to enlarge)

English translation from an older report:

(click to enlarge)

As mentioned earlier these arise due to capital flight into Germany from the “periphery” countries.

Some economists and financial analysts try to downplay this by saying that in reality the actual loss (in case of a breakup of the Euro Area and subsequent default by the periphery) to Bundesbank and hence Germany is lesser and this number should be multiplied by the capital key. For Bundesbank this is 18.9373% and using the February number this amounts to a maximum loss of €106bn as per this calculation.

This is misleading to the core. Firstly if the debtor nations default the creditor nations suffer in full. So if Bundesbank’s losses are low, other creditor nations’ losses will be high. Also, Bundesbank suffers due to losses incurred by other NCBs of creditor nations such as Belgium since these losses are shared. Secondly, the capital key would be some sort of weighted key among the creditor nations’ central banks and will be higher.

At any rate, the creditor nation lose the full amount of the claim of the ECB on the periphery nations in the case of a breakup. This number can vastly increase if there is a panic and further capital flight into the “core”. Of course, there will be other losses and costs of a breakup but IMO – nonetheless this is not unimportant.

Having said this, these things are very unpredictable – it is perfectly possible that a boom in financial markets for whatever reasons reverses the flight making the unsustainable process run longer than one may think. It is also possible – as Euro Area leaders have been planning wittingly or unwittingly – that trade is balanced internally by deflating demand in debtor nations and but this will come with a lower output and higher unemployment in general and injures all alike.

The above increase could also have been because banks in nations such as Spain may have redeemed some of their liabilities to banks in Germany and refinanced themselves via the three-year LTRO in February.

Banco de España’s TARGET2 Liabilities: Again

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I had a post a month ago Banco de España’s TARGET2 Liabilities and this gets more interesting a month later. The bank released numbers for February and it seems capital flight is continuing from Spain and Spanish banks’ borrowing from the ECB rose in February. The following is from BdE

(click to enlarge)

The Spanish general government debt also continues to rise

(click to enlarge)

With Spain’s net indebtedness (not gross government debt) of €995bn to the rest of the world and having surrendered monetary sovereignty, this is not the best time for the nation – to say the least!

Deutsche Bundesbank’s TARGET2 Claims

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Yesterday Wolfgang Münchau wrote an article in the Financial Times The Bundesbank has no right at all to be baffled in which he gave his opinion about Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann’s leaked letter to the European Central Bank President  Mario Draghi expressing concerns on the Bundesbank’s TARGET2 assets.

According to the Bundesbank December 2011 Monthly Report, its claims on the rest of the Eurosystem was around €476bn (and that it reduced somewhat in December!)

According to Münchau,

The Bundesbank initially dismissed the Target 2 balance as a matter of statistics. Their argument was: yes, it is recorded in the Bundesbank’s accounts, but the counterparty risk is divided among all members according to their share in the system. But last week, Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, acknowledged the Target 2 imbalances are indeed important, and an unacceptable risk. The Bundesbank has now joined the united front of German academic opinion.

and that:

One would assume that the best policies would be those that attack the root of the problem – the imbalances themselves. One of the deep causes behind this problem is, of course, Germany’s persistent current account surplus. The problem can thus easily be solved through policies to encourage Germany to raise its imports relative to its exports. You need policies that provide eurozone-wide backstops to the banking sector, and also policies to insure against asymmetric shocks. And you need to harmonise many aspects of structural policy to ensure imbalances do not become entrenched.

But there is no appetite for any of this in Germany. Instead, the Bundesbank prefers to solve the problem by addressing the funding side. Mr Weidmann proposed last week that Germany’s Target 2 claims should be securitised. Just think about this for a second. He demands contingent access to Greek and Spanish property and other assets to a value of €500bn in case the eurozone should collapse. He might as well have suggested sending in the Luftwaffe to solve the eurozone crisis. The proposal is unbelievably extreme.

This is indeed extreme but there are ones who argue that the Bundesbank’s (approximately) €476bn TARGET2 assets do not matter much – because the Bundesbank being the issuer of settlement balances of banks cannot go broke. This is from the Irish Economy Blog:

First, every national central bank in the Eurosystem currently has assets that exceed their liabilities and total Target2 credits equal Target2 liabilities. Thus, the most likely resolution of Target imbalances in the case of a full Euro breakup would be a pooling of assets held by Target2 debtors to be handed over to Target2 creditors to settle the balance. This may leave the Bundesbank holding a set of peripheral- originated assets that may be worth less that face value but this scenario would result in losses to the Bundesbank that would be far short of the current value of its Target2 credit.

Second, as Gavyn Davies discusses in this interesting FT article, central bank balance sheets are simply not the same as normal private sector balance sheets. It is unwise for central banks to go around printing money to purchase worthless assets so it is generally appropriate to insist that a central bank’s assets at least equal the value of the money it has created.

That said, should the Bundesbank end of losing a bunch of money because its Target2 credit was worth less than stated, there would be no earthly reason why the German public would need to give up large amounts of money to ensure that the Bundesbank remained “solvent”.

In a post-euro world, the Bundesbank would be one of a select number of central banks that could be counted on to print a currency likely to retain its value. Weidmann could write himself a cheque, stick it in the vaults and declare the Bundesbank to be solvent without any need to call on the German taxpayer.

I had written on this sometime back in the post Who is Germany? so I refer the reader to the post. Briefly my argument is that the TARGET2 balance is an important item in Germany’s International Investment Position. If there is a breakup of the Euro Area, then Germany’s wealth reduces. Indeed Karl Whelan has somewhat changed his position – from arguing it doesn’t matter to arguing that there will be a demand for settlement!

Matters can get worse in case there is a dreadful scenario in which the financial firms do a panic selling of assets in the Euro Area but held outside Germany and make a “flight to quality” to Germany. This by itself does not change Germany’s net international position (only gross items in IIP) but if the breakup results in a default by the “periphery”, Germany’s wealth erodes (among other assets, TARGET2 claims vanish overnight) and it can become a net debtor of the rest of the world from being a net creditor!

National Balance Sheet

In one of my recent posts, I went into the concept of “National Saving”. The stock counterpart of this is the “Net Worth”. It is calculated by first taking the nonfinancial assets within a nation’s boundary (defined appropriately on what is counted and what is not). Then one adds financial assets and liabilities. The claims within sectors of an economy cancel out because every asset has a counterpart liability and one is left with assets and liabilities with the rest of the world.

This is the SNA concept of net worth. It is done for example for the case of Australia in the following manner by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. (Link to the full release Australian System of National Accounts 2010-11)

So if a nation’s external assets are impaired for whatever reason, its wealth reduces. It doesn’t matter if it is the central bank whose assets are impaired. This is counter-intuitive because no sector immediately may “feel the pinch” due to the central bank’s loss of assets held abroad.

That’s a bit of Mercantilism. It is true that Mercantilist policies “injures everyone alike” as argued by Keynes himself and later by many Post Keynesians (such as Basil Moore whom I quoted in this post). However, it cannot be argued that a potential asset impairment of the Bundesbank’s TARGET2 balance does not cost the German taxpayer. So the Bundesbank would indeed go behind debtor nations and ask them to settle claims!

Needless to say, this is no defense of Weidmann’s position!

Recycling Old Posts

Here are some related posts on basics of TARGET2 and the Eurosystem: The Eurosystem: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, & Part 5.

Banco de España’s TARGET2 Liabilities

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Spain as a nation owes the rest of the world around €995bn according to the Banco de España International Investment Position data which is very high when compared to the 2011 GDP of €1,073bn. (And according to today’s release, real GDP fell 0.3% q/q in Q4 2011.)

Although, credit conditions in domestic and international money markets and capital markets in the Euro Area seemed to have eased in January, it seems Spanish banks are still not in the best shape. According to a Banco de España release, TARGET2 liabilities increased to around €176bn in January from around €151bn in December. Also, as a result banks in Spain have made heavy use of the LTRO facility as per the screenshot below:

(click to enlarge)

So capital flight out of Spain continues. Of course, this process can go on for longer than one could ever imagine earlier (because of the accommodative policy of the ECB and the laws governing the operations of the Eurosystem) but it is a good indicator of stress in balance-of-payments financing for Spain and the lack of fiscal space.

The (Almost) Irrelevance Of Reserve Requirements

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Earlier this week, the Reserve Bank of India reduced banks’ reserve requirements by 50bps. It’s called Cash Reserve Ratio and the RBI reduced it from 6.00% to 5.50% with effect from the following week.

The Reserve Bank of India is one of the most backward central bank in liquidity management and sometimes panics and changes the reserve requirements. Typically this happens when taxes flow into the government of India’s account at the RBI and since this is not smooth, the RBI simply doesn’t know what to do.

To me this confusion was good, because three years back when someone asked me to read about this in office, I came across this Reuters article and after reading it (and slightly before when I became interested in macroeconomics after the Federal Reserve announced a Large Scale Asset Purchase Program, popularly known as “QE”) I started having suspicions on the way economists seem to describe banking and economics. This ultimately led me to some Neochartalists’ blogs and finally to Post-Keynesian Economics.

In many countries central banks have a zero-reserve requirement, such as in the UK, Canada, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, the Federal Reserve imposes a requirement of 10% with additional complications.

Basil Moore in his 1988 book Horizontalists and Verticalists goes into the details of central banking operating procedures and provides a fantastic account of central banking. See pages 63-65 and 95-97 for reserve requirements.

From page 63-65:

… Fed non-interest earning reserve requirements put member banks at a disadvantage relative to non-members, who were generally allowed to hold interest-earning assets as reserves and who in addition typically had lower reserve requirements. Because membership in the Federal Reserve system is voluntary under the dual banking system tradition, as interest rates rose an increasing number of banks withdrew from the system. In desperation the Federal Reserve finally proposed to pay interest on required reserve balances. Congressional reaction to this potential erosion of seigniorage from reserve earnings was loud and swift and led rapidly to the Monetary Control Act of 1980. Its solution, to make reserve requirements universal and uniform for all depository institutions, whether members of the Federal Reserve or not, was, as revealed in the 1979 hearings before the Senate Banking Committee, a compromise clearly designed to safeguard the volume of Fed-Treasury transfers and at the same time reduce membership attrition for the Fed.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, changes in reserve requirements imposed by the central bank do not directly affect the volume of bank intermediation. A change of required reserve ratios influences the volume of bank intermediation only indirectly, by affecting the required reserve markup or spread. A rise (reduction) in reserve requirements raises (lowers) the cost of obtaining funds to place in loans financed via  additional reservable deposits, in the manner of an indirect tax. The banks will therefore raise (lower) the markup of their lending rates over their borrowing rates. As a result, depending on the interest elasticity of demand for bank credit, the volume of bank intermediation will be indirectly reduced (increased).

From pages 95-97:

… In practice the Federal Reserve fully compensates for any excess reserves created by a lowering of reserve requirements by open-market sales so as to maintain free reserves at some target level. This evidence is clearly consistent with the notion that nominal money stock is demand-determined …

There are other effects. The ECB governing council decided in December to reduce reserve requirements to 1% from 2%  January 18. This “freed up” a lot of collateral banks in the Euro Area needed to pledge to the Eurosystem, thereby providing some relief to the banking system in crisis.

Chart Source: ECB

On 18 January, reserve requirement was €103.33bn as compared to €207.03bn on the previous day.