Surprise of the day... another bad idea

from the EU. This time, the collected EU finance ministers seem to think that by buying back Greek debt at depressed prices, they can really make those irritating, overpaid bankers pay. There may be clever ways of engineering such an outcome, but the basic idea doesn't work. In one of their classic papers, Bulow and Rogoff (QJE 91) & nbsp;show that buying back debt is no way to reduce the burden of too much debt. Open market buybacks, at least, ""allow creditors to reap more than 100 percent of any efficiency gains"". Why? A country's repayment capacity is its repayment capacity. As you buy back debt, you effectively spread that capacity over ever fewer bonds - there is more blood, sweat, and tears squeezed from the Greek taxpayer for each bondholder remaining. The secondary market price of debt rises as repurchases proceed. Most likely, the market value of all bonds outstanding stays roughly constant as the face value declines. So, what to do? Maybe buy-backs are the answer, but to get it right, get a good advisor to design the process - like Paul Klemperer of Nuffield, Oxford, who advised the UK government on G3-spectrum auctions.

tear gas and ""chicken""

Nathaniel Rothschild allegedly said that one should ""buy to the thunder of cannons and sell to the sound of trumpets"". I guess, the modern-day version would be to trade to the smell of tear gas, which has been wafting across Athens recently. Closer to home, in the beautiful park next to the university that houses the Catalan parliament, ministers and MPs were surrounded by Spain's own indignados movement... which made it just that touch harder to be in the office on time this morning, with riot police blocking many of the streets leading to the campus. It was pretty calm as things go, with no violent clashes, but the image of ministers being ferried in by helicopter reminded me a bit of President De La Rua's last day in office.



Back to the issue of trading: Even popular financial advice sites like marketwatch are now offering suggestions on how to make $$$ from a coming Greek default. I would say, not so fast... we are mainly witnessing a public game of ""chicken"" between the German finance ministry and the ECB. Some of this is squarely aimed at the wider public -- ""look, we are trying to get tough with private creditors"". While the EU has an amazing talent to screw up things, I would say -- uncharacteristically, as those who know my pessimistic side might think -- that this one is too important to go wrong, and that a deal will eventually get done, with no more than a bit of a Vienna-style initiative imposed on the creditors. Now, if only the Greek government will actually stay in office for long enough to see through the implementation of the next round of austerity...

if this is private sector pain...

I want some. The EU finally got its act together: There will be a selective default to make the private sector pay... but the banks and insurance companies that agreed to the bond swap are not the only private investors out there. There was news that vulture funds were buying Greek bonds for 50 Eurocents on the € in early July, and now, the EU deal is making some people out there a lot better off. Some of the price action today:



Greek Eurobonds, inflation-indexed, 2003 (25) + 28.9%

EO-notes 2009 (19) + 21.1%

EO-notes 2009 (14) + 14.4%



...and so on, across the entire maturity spectrum. The rally started at a very low level, as we all know, and the 2009(14) for example is still trading at 63% of face value, for a yield to maturity of 24.9% p.a. That's down from over 35% a few days ago. Over the last year or so, every additional aid measure has been greeted with a relief rally, only to be followed by an ever-deeper slump. Will this one come to stay? I think it just might. Once markets factor in the lower bond yields, debt sustainability will look a lot better. That justifies lower yields, and so on. The mountain of debt hasn't gone away, but paying for it will have become just that much easier so that, together with the EU generously sprinkling aid on Greece, an outright default might not be on the cards after all...