Cardiff Garcia responde todo sobre Eslovenia

Genevieve Signoret & Patrick Signoret

Cardiff Garcia explica en FT Alphaville el problema en Eslovenia y qué va a pasar ahora. Concluye que definitivamente no se trata de “otro Chipre”. Vía Garcia, este artículo de Bloomberg contiene más contexto sobre la banca eslovena.

Recomendamos ampliamente el artículo completo de Garcia, pero presentamos a continuación algunos pasajes. Comienza con el contexto del problema. Suena conocido.

Surging investment in the middle of the last decade produced a home price bubble and a household consumption binge, as foreign sources of financing helped fuel increasing purchases of imports and a newly prosperous construction sector. The annual current account deficit reached 8 per cent of GDP at its peak.

With the crisis came the reversal. Investment collapsed and so did imports. External funding disappeared as foreign banks started pulling their loans to Slovenian banks, which had relied more on interbank lending than on capital markets. The seemingly inexorable rise in household borrowing and spending immediately halted.

Unemployment spiked, just as in the rest of the eurozone, while the government budget deficit widened when tax receipts fell.

Y aquí, como en otros países de la eurozona, se produjo un ciclo vicioso entre el soberano y sus bancos. Comenzó así:

Slovenia’s government debt is about half of GDP, still quite low for Europe, and its budget deficit is projected to be a manageable 5.1 per cent this year.

But the country’s economic malaise, the decline in its fiscal position and problems in its banking sector led to difficulty finding foreign buyers for its sovereign bonds — naturally coinciding with the general collapse in cross-border flows throughout the eurozone overall.

So the government stopped issuing bonds, and since 2011 it has paid its debt obligations — including servicing the bonds it sold to foreign investors — and funded its budget deficit through short-term bills.

And many of those bills have been sold to the country’s domestic banks, the three largest of which are owned, directly and indirectly, by the government.

Se vuelve más complicado. Los bancos presentan estas notas de corto plazo como colateral al banco central de Eslovenia, que puede ser visto como un brazo del BCE. Reciben a cambio derechos de liquidez en euros, y transfieren estos derechos al gobierno. El gobierno los utiliza para pagar a tenedores extranjeros de bonos. Este es el ciclo vicioso.

El problema de los bancos empeorará antes de mejorar, por lo que deberán ser recapitalizados:

The country’s non-financial corporate sector remains hugely overleveraged, having boasted the highest net debt-to-income ratio in the entire euro area at the end of 2011, according to RBC Capital Markets and Eurostat.

The downturn has precipitated a credit crunch, and the unwillingness or inability of banks to continue rolling over loans to these companies exacerbates both the recession and the problem of non-performing debt.

All of which means that the banks’ problems are almost certain to get worse before they get better. The IMF has called for the banking system to be recapitalised, and everyone expects that it will be. But there continues to be much uncertainty about what the recapitalisation would look like.

¿Cuánto dinero se requerirá? García cita estimaciones desde mil millones hasta nueve mil millones de euros. El capital vendría del gobierno esloveno. La pregunta es si el gobierno puede recaudar el capital solo o si requerirá ayuda internacional. Si requiere ayuda internacional:

There are several possibilities, but the most likely scenario involves the Slovenian government borrowing bonds from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and then using those bonds to recapitalise the banks.

The bonds could might be borrowed directly by the government or channeled through the country’s Bank Asset Management Company, or “bad bank”, but either way the government will be on the hook to the ESM for the bonds.

Slovenian banks can then use the ESM bonds as collateral pledged to the Slovenian central bank. Kind of similar to what happened in Spain.

The hope is that the additional borrowing by the sovereign won’t further freeze it out of open debt markets but rather do the opposite — make it easier for the Slovenian government to borrow because debt markets will gain confidence that it won’t have to further support its banks in the future.

Más adelante, García muestra por qué Eslovenia no es “un nuevo Chipre”.

It is dramatically different, and this chart from Exane BNP Paribas shows the main reason why:

The Slovenian banking system wasn’t a tax haven being used to recycle dodgy Russian money. It is also far less reliant on deposits for funding, and the scale of its importance to the domestic economy doesn’t rival that of the Cypriot banks.

And again, relative to other peripheral countries its finances also look decent.

Concluye:

It would be a mistake to act blasé given the chance of a policy error or unanticipated complications. But at the moment it seems that the Slovenian problem is soluble and brings less risk of such an error than Cyprus carried.