The Italian job just got a whole lot harder

by Shaun Richards

The last few days have brought back memories of old times as an old stomping ground has returned to the forefront of financial news. This has been the Italian bond market which has been since Friday morning a real life example of the trading phrase “Don’t try to catch a falling piano”, or in some cases knife. If we look at the Italian bond future it has fallen 6 points since late on Thursday from a bit above 127 to a bit above 121. For these times a 2 point a day drop in a bond market is quite a bit especially when we consider that one large holder will not be selling. That is of course the European Central Bank or ECB which as of the 21st of September had bought some 356.4 billion Euros of them. So we note as an initial point that  falls of this magnitude, which has been on average the old price limit for US Treasury Bond futures ( a 2 point move led to a temporary trading stop back in the day) can happen even in the QE era.

Putting this another way the yield on the Italian ten-year benchmark bond has risen to 3.4%. This means that if we look at the deposit rate of the ECB which is -0.4% there is quite a yield curve here. It starts early with for those who have been invested here quite a chilling thought. You see as recently as mid may the Italian two-year yield was negative ( last December it was -0.36%) whereas at the time of typing this it is 1.56%. So those long have had a disaster although of course they can hold the bond to maturity and just lose the yield. Although of course we would not be here if there were not at least the beginnings of fears over the maturity itself such as perhaps you not being paid in Euros. From @DailyFXTeam.

EUR Borghi comments on the desirability of Italy having its own currency push Italian 10-yr yields to 3.4%, highest since March, 2014

Claudio Borghi is the chief adviser to Matteo Salvini who is Deputy Prime Minister and has been upping the rhetoric himself this morning. Via Twitters translation service.

In Italy No one is drinking the threats of Juncker, which now associates our country with Greece.

Madness they call it madness

There has been plenty of this including this curious statement yesterday from Matteo Salvini.

*ITALY’S SALVINI SAYS `GENTLEMEN OF THE SPREAD’ WILL UNDERSTAND

If we bypass the obvious sexism he is referring to the yield spread between Italian bonds and the benchmark for the Euro area which is of course Germany. A part of the Euro project is that these should converge over time as economies also converge. Except we have seen quite a divergence recently as if we look at the ten-year gap this morning it reached 3% per annum, which if you held to maturity would be a tidy sum especially if this fantasy came true.

Borghi advocating an ECB enforced max spread to Germany of 150bps. ( h/t @stewhampton )

In recent times it would appear that the ECB has been the main buyer of BTPs but it as of this week has reduced again its purchases and will buy around 1.7 billion Euros only in October. As we stand it seems unlikely to fire up its QE programme just for Italy. It did buy Italian bonds back at the peak of the Euro area crisis but bond yields were more than double what they are now.

The Deficit

In the grand scheme of things the change here has been quite minor. From Reuters.

Italy new eurosceptic government proposed on Thursday a budget that increases the deficit to 2.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2019, tripling it in comparison with the plans of its predecessors.

Actually the real change has been from 1.8% of GDP as rumoured just over a week ago, as we find that 0.6% of GDP has turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Actually the real switch in my opinion is not to be found here but rather in the implications for the national debt.

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Under EU law Italy should reduce its public debt rather than increase borrowing. Rome’s total debt is worth 133 percent of GDP.

Just as a reminder the Euro area limit is supposed to be 60% of GDP. Thus Italy is supposed to be reducing its ratio but we know that it has been increasing it over the credit crunch era. Should the higher bond yields last then they will put further upwards pressure on it and in some respects Italy will start to look a little like Greece.

The economy

This is the crux of the matter as the most revealing point is that the budget forecast relies on Italy growing at 1.6% or 1.7% next year. The catch for those who have not followed its economic trajectory is that it only grows at about 1% in the good years and has had a dreadful credit crunch era. Those who were cheerleaders for the “Renzinomics” of around 2014 need to eat more than one slice of humble pie as it never happened. Yesterday brought another same as it ever was signal.

Manufacturing operating conditions in Italy stagnated during September as output and new orders both fell marginally. Job creation was sustained, but at a much slower rate as signs of spare capacity persisted………September’s data also marked the first time in just over two years that the sector has failed to expand.
Manufacturing output fell in September. Although negligible, the decline in production marked a second successive monthly contraction in line with a similar development for new orders.

If we switch to the official monthly economic report it too is downbeat.

In August, both consumer confidence and the composite business indicator declined, influenced respectively by the worsening of economic expectations and the climate in manufacturing sector, which is further affected by the
decline in book orders and expectations on production.

So we see that Italy which grew by 0.5% in the first half of the year will do well to repeat that in the second half especially if we note the slowing of the Euro area money supply we looked at last Thursday.

Much better news came from the labour market.

In August 2018, 23.369 million persons were employed, +0.3% over July. Unemployed were 2.522 million,
-4.5% over the previous month……..Employment rate was 59.0%, +0.2 percentage points over the previous month, unemployment rate was 9.7%, -0.4 percentage points over July 2018 and inactivity rate was 34.5%, +0.1 points over the previous month.

Let us hope that is true as Italy badly needs some good economic news, but it has developed a habit of declaring such numbers and then revising them higher later. Also it remains a bad time to be young in Italy.

Youth unemployment rate (aged 15-24) was 31.0%, +0.2 percentage points over the previous month

Comment

The situation here is something which has been changed by some rather small developments. Why? Well it is a consequence of my “Girlfriend in a Coma” theme which I have been running for some years now. When you grow by so little in the good times you are left vulnerable to changes, and hence apparently small ones can cause trouble. This has been added to by the frankly silly rhetoric on both sides.

Added to this is the issue of the consequences of the QE era which has been a subject over the past couple of weeks. Italy tucked itself under the “Whatever it takes” umbrella of President Draghi of the ECB but has not reformed much if at all so as the umbrella gets folded up and put away it is vulnerable again. Since that speech was given in the summer of 2012 the Italian economy has grown by a bit over 2% and is still some 4-5% smaller than it was a decade ago. This is the real Girlfriend in a coma issue which has led to the problems with the banks and the national debt and has given us the Italian version of a lost decade. As the population has been growing the individual experience has been even worse than that.

The other way that Italy is different to Greece is that in Euro terms it is indeed systemic due to its much larger size.

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