Of loose cannons on the world’s deck

Back in 1998 as a part of a Masters in International Politics, I wrote an essay on monetary unions and the future of the Euro. At the time convergence trades were all the rage and the soon-to-be members were busy pretending they were complying with their Maastricht treaty obligations. The essay’s conclusion was that the Euro would not long survive its first test.

History clearly demonstrates that a monetary union will fail without a common political will. The Euro has never achieved political union.

So the Euro stumbled through the private debt crisis of 2008 on the back of central bank largesse. This lead to a global socialisation of the massive debt binge that had accumulated through the mortgage and credit markets. But while the ECB. like most its central banking peers, was busy engorging its balance sheet there was still no consolidation of debts, each nation-state remained it own issuer.

So now we are approaching the next debt crisis – a result of 10 years of zero interest rates where the private sector has been encouraged to re-leverage, valuation multiples are back to all-time highs, and now the central banks are carrying impossibly large balance sheets. The sensitivity of the system to rising interest rates is acute.

And we have a Euro-land dominated by one very large creditor and quite a few large debtors. To date, the creditor has won out, forcing ‘internal devaluation’ on their partners. But the next stage of the sovereign debt crisis is unlikely to play to that script. You can already see capital flight out of Italy through the Target2 balances. The only palatable way out of this mess is to inflate your way out of debt – and the Italians have the keys to that locker. Beware the vagaries of capital in a hurry to find an exit…

During this new stage of the depression, the refugee gold and the foreign government reserve deposits were constantly driven by fear hither and yon over the world. We were to see currencies demoralized and governments embarrassed as fear drove the gold from one country to another. In fact, there was a mass of gold and short-term credit which behaved like a loose cannon on the deck of the world in a tempest-tossed era.

Herbert Hoover, Memoirs, Volume II, Chapter 7, page 67