The 'Fragile Eight' and Terms of Trade

Another day, another warning of possible global implosion. This time it's from the Geneva Group: as lofty a  bunch of European financial and economic practitioners as you're likely to come across. Entitled 'De-leveraging, What Deleveraging?' the report is for the most part a detailed explanation of why high levels of indebtedness can be dangerous. It also attempts to identify the difference between simple recessions and various types of debt-triggered disasters (an attempt which hinges on a touching faith in the ability to identify 'potential GDP'); and finally it focusses on the build-up of debt in emerging markets, warning of the possibility that the next financial crisis may be bubbling up in China and/or a group they identify as 'the Fragile Eight.'

The 'Fragile Eight' are: Argentina (129% debt/GDP in 2013); Brazil (121%); Chile; India (120%); Indonesia (65%); Russia (43%); South Africa (127%) and Turkey (105%).

In this article, I'm going to ignore China, and instead focus on the 'Fragile Eight'.  Or rather, I want to focus on one of the key factors which can turn an underlying fragility into a genuine crisis. the Geneva Group identifies three main types of crisis: banking crises; sovereign debt crises; and external crises, which they describe as an inability to rollover existing debt or obtain funding to cover current account deficits.  But each of these need a trigger - a shock which catalyses the crisis, of whatever type it may be. And in my experience, one key trigger which is almost always present, but which almost always gets ignored until it's too late, is a deterioration in a country's terms of trade - ie, a rise in import prices it must pay relative to the export prices it can command.

Big shifts in a country's international terms of trade really matter.  In terms of debt crises, they matter particularly because;
i) in practical terms, a deterioration in terms of trade usually results in a deterioration in underlying cashflows within an economy, which in turn  can expose latent financial vulnerabilities both to, and within,  a country's financial system;
ii)  since a country's terms of trade signal an international ability to price its goods and services, it is also a reflection on its potential growth rate. Put simply, if a country's terms of trade are rising, the world wants what it has to offer; conversely, if they are falling, the world's appetite for its goods and services are in relative decline.  And, of course, even though experience warns us that attempts to pinpoint a country's potential growth with any useful accuracy usually fail, a shift in the terms of trade is a useful indicator of which way the wind is blowing.

For each of the Fragile Eight, I have looked at movements in the Citi Terms of Trade Index since the beginning of 2006, and tracked where September's index is relative to the long term average, and also at the change during the last 12 months.  In both cases, I'm interested in both the extremity of the current position, and in the speed at which changes have happened.  In order to capture this, I have expressed the current deviation in terms of standard deviations from the post-2006 average.

This table reveals the Fragile Eight are not as coherent a group as the Geneva Report assumes.
i) For Turkey, Russia and India, the story told by the terms of trade are either positive or neutral, with the implications for improved cashflows that implies. These are the the Not-So-Fragile Three.
ii) Conversely, there are two, and possibly three, clear losers. Brazil is the biggest loser both in terms of how far from the post-2006 average September's position  has fallen (2SDs below) and the speed at which this fall has occurred (2.3SDs over the last 12 months).  South Africa and Indonesia also look like major losers, with Indonesia's terms of trade currently 1.7SDs below its l/t average, and South Africa's 1.4SDs below. Of these two, however, South Africa looks the more vulnerable, because it starts with a much higher leverage (127% of GDP vs Indonesia's 65%), and because Indonesia's terms of trade appear to have virtually stabilized over the last 12 months, whilst South Africa's has deteriorated quite sharply (down 0.5SDs).
iii) Finally, whilst both Argentina and Chile are suffering a modest deterioration in terms of trade, the current position and the speed which which current deterioration has arrived look relatively unexceptional.

Finally, it is worth remembering that terms of trade are a global zero-sum game: one country's terms of trade loss is another country's terms of trade gain.  What may yet prove the most important factor in the world's cycle is the unusual strength and resilience in terms of trade which developed markets are now showing. This phenomenon embraces not just the US and Europe, but also most of Northeast Asia, including economies who's histories have for years or even decades been suffered incessant terms of trade problems.  More on that later. . . .  

Eurozone - Expansion Despite Policymakers Best Efforts

There are very good reasons why the Eurozone is identified as a major drag on the world economy: its policymakers have managed to distil a formula of strategic policies which are fundamentally toxic.  The mix tightens fiscal policies whilst at the same time demanding bank recapitalization, all within a single-currency framework which imposes on approximately half the continent the wrong international pricing for locally-produced goods and services.  The resulting slide towards deflation isn’t an accident, it is policy (sometime referred to as ‘internal devaluation). To that must be added a studied lack of enthusiasm for supply-side reforms, and in certain cases (Italy, Spain, Portugal at least) an inherited public sector debt problem which, without a return to vigorous nominal GDP growth, must eventually end in default.

None of this is news to those outside the policymaking environs of the EU.  What is more surprising is that the Eurozone continues to grow at all (albeit 2Q GDP was virtually unchanged qoq, annualizing to just 0.1%), and might be expected to accelerate mildly over the coming year. And yet embedded in the misery, there are developments which would, in other circumstances, herald a cyclical recovery.  The good news shows up in rising productivity of the two key factors of production: capital and labour.

The first chart attempts to identify directional trends in return on capital by considering nominal GDP as an income from a stock of fixed capital. Movements in that capital stock are estimated by assuming a 10yr depreciation of all gross fixed capital formation (as identified in quarterly national accounts). The chart shows a pattern in which capital stock has been shrinking since the beginning of 2013, and is currently now shrinking around 0.6% a year in nominal terms.  Since nominal GDP is currently rising at approximately three times that rate, asset turns are rising sharply, which in turn generates a rise in return on capital.

This cyclical dynamic of capital spending stalling sufficiently to allow a rise in asset turns is a familiar feature of economic cycles, and the corollary of rising asset turns is, of course, a resurgence of investment spending. The problem is that elsewhere in the world,  in this cycle the gap between return on capital rising and capital stock beginning to be replenished has been extraordinarily long.  For example, in the US, the ROC directional indicator bottomed out in 2Q99, and recovered to its pre-crisis levels by 3Q10, but it took until 2Q11 for capital stock to stop shrinking.  And then the recovery has been exceptionally muted: by 2Q14, although the ROC directional indicator was at its highest since the early 1980s, capital stock was growing at only 2.1% yoy.   One can guess at the reasons for this relative dislocation between ROC and capital spending: a fundamental lack of medium-term commercial confidence; an underlying deflationary expectations; a failure financial intermediation. Whatever the reason, ROC may be rising, but it seems obviously premature to expect any sort of sustained recovery in Eurozone investment spending.

The news is less bad for the second factor of production: labour. The cyclical dynamic plays out in much the same way as it does for capital: in the early stage of a recession, employment falls sufficiently to allow labour productivity (deflated by changes in capital per worker) to rise. When productivity begins to rise, labour markets begin to recover.  And here the trends in the Eurozone are slightly encouraging: real output per worker, adjusted for changes in capital per worker, are rising at approximately 1.7% yoy (output per worker up +0.6% yoy, capital per worker down c1% yoy). And in response, employment in the Eurozone is actually rising, by around 0.5% yoy in 2Q. This rise in employment is currently concentrated in two economies: Spain (up 2% yoy) and Germany (up 0.8% yoy). However, there is no reason not to expect this employment gain to be maintained, and gradually strengthened. In both the UK and (to a lesser extent) the US, the sustained rise in employment, backed by rises in labour productivity (deflated by capital stock) has been the key to the sustained and generally non-cyclical expansions currently underway.   And this is the key, the Eurozone’s recovery, though tepid, is unlikely to show signs of becoming self-supportingly ‘cyclical’ any time soon. 

Two final charts illustrate the point. The first is of the Eurozone’s private sector savings surplus: this I estimate at approximately 5.2% of GDP in the 12m to 2Q. The private sector savings surplus shows, of course, the balance between private investment and savings, and self-evidently, strong changes in the balance of these decisions are a key dynamic of investment cycles. Hence in 2008-2009 the financial crisis produced a very sharp jump in the PSSS from a savings surplus of around 0.7% at end-2007 to a high of 6.6% in  1Q10. The current dynamics are not similarly cyclical – since 4Q12 the surplus has wandered between 5% and 5.6% of GDP, and is currently drifting downwards, to around 5.2%: savings and investment decisions show no signs of dramatic movement.

The private sector savings surplus is also a measure of the fundamental vector of flows of cash between the private sector and the financial system – a savings surplus ends up as a net flow of private sector cash into the financial system, whilst a deficit will have to be funded by a flow of cash from the financial system to the private sector (for example, by bank lending and a rising loan/deposit ratio).  In a bank-dominated financial system, the positive flow of cash associated with a savings surplus will accumulate in bank deposits, and thus in the money aggregate M2.  It is therefore crucial to determine how effectively the banking system can recycle these savings back into the economy. One measure of this is monetary velocity (GDP/M2).  And as the chart shows this is showing a small but continuing decline.  Consider what this means: in the 3m to July, M2 grew at 2.3% yoy, and if monetary velocity continues to fade whilst monetary growth remains stable, nominal GDP growth must sink below the 1.8% achieved in 2Q14.

The ECB plainly understands the impact of the continuing inability of the Eurozone’s financial institutions to improve its recycling of private savings flows.  However, there is little evidence that even a fully committed policy of quantitative easing can reverse this fall in monetary velocity. In the US, all the Fed’s quantitative easing, coupled with a convincing expansion, has not yet managed to reverse the fall in monetary velocity. In the UK, quantitative easing has not stopped the long-term decline of M2, and, of course, in Japan, monetary velocity has been falling virtually without interruption since 1993.  The message seems to be that central largesse cannot make commercial banks into efficient recyclers of private sector savings – it can only attempt to overwhelm that inefficiency with sheer scale.

Where does this leave the Eurozone as a contributor to global growth in the short and medium term? Surprisingly, perhaps, leaves us with grounds to expect that a modest expansion can be maintained, despite the slowdown of 2Q, simply on the basis that rising labour productivity in the absence of net positive capital spending, will allow for a modest but sustained rise in employment, which in turn can provide some modest expansion in demand.   But there are two caveats: first, there is no reason to expect any obvious acceleration in pro-cyclical behaviour; second, there is no reason to expect that nominal GDP will match levels of M2 growth any time soon; and third, there is no reason to expect that any relatively modest steps towards quantitative easing by the ECB will succeed in inducing any pro-cyclical behaviour in the short to medium term. The Eurozone will remain a drag on world growth, but in the short to medium term, probably not more so than we are currently used to. 

This is an excerpt from the Shocks & Surprises Global Weekly Summary for the week to 19th September. Please email me if you would like to see a copy.

Bulletin of Broken Dreams - With Two Grounds for Hope

'Let's go'
'Yes, let's'
They do not move as the curtain falls. 

It is nearly midsummer, so time for taking stock of how the first half of the year has developed. Musing over this, it struck me that the hopes and expectations commonly held at the end of 2013 have receded so rapidly that even recalling them requires an imaginative effort.  

Do you remember when China's Third Plenum was going to usher in a new and energetic phase of reform in which an improved capital allocation would lay the foundations for a shift towards consumption-led demand and rising return on capital?  What we have got is a tremendous amount of political energy diverted into an anti-corruption campaign and a host of mini-measures aiming to fine-tune the economy to ensure that the same old broad GDP targets are met . . . anyhow, it seems. That Xi Jinping may turn out to be China's Brezhnev remains an awful possibility. 

Do you remember when Abenomics was going to rejuvenate Japan? The core of that strategy was a hope that sufficiently dramatic policy initiatives from both the central bank and the government could fundamentally re-order Japanese expectations – which is to say household and corporate financial and economic behaviour. So far the devaluation of the yen has produced a mild and belated upturn, but close examination of corporate behaviour shows no deviation whatsoever from the tactics and strategies hard-learned during deflation. It is still not clear that what 'third arrow' policies will be adopted, but currently it seems that the most that can be hoped for is a snail's pace  scaling down of corporate tax rates paid for by closing other tax breaks.  It seems unlikely to fundamentally change corporate expectations or behaviour. 

There were, perhaps, no great expectations of the Eurozone, except that a pickup in the rest of the global economy might mitigate the damage done by policies aimed only at extending the Euro's half-life as a viable currency.  Nothing has changed there, except a quiet backsliding on measures to underpin a banking union, and a quiet backsliding on some of the excesses of the destructive fiscal compact. Voters turned in unprecedented numbers to elect members of the European Parliament opposed in a variety of ways to the EU institutions' agenda. But it seems likely the new head of the European Commission will be a man who's main qualification is a lifetime's unthinking and unbending devotion to 'the project'.

So our anticipation of reforms which might help re-boot the global economy were ill-founded and are probably best forgotten. Despite all that, the outlook for the world economy has actually improved, and will probably continue to improve during 2H, even if the reasons are altogether more mundane (see previous comments on prospects for G3 imports and NE Asian exports). 

At the centre of this is the US recovery, which continues to accelerate without really threatening to reach escape velocity. Two indicators give a pretty clear visual idea of where we are: employees' willingness to quit their jobs; and small businesses' intention to expand capex.  Both are grinding higher, but at such a slow pace that there's no short or even medium term likelihood of reaching their pre-crisis cruising altitudes any time soon. The quit rate is a good indicator of how employees think about the state of  labour markets – the higher the quit rate, the greater the quitting employee's confidence that an alternative job awaits. Latest data shows it has risen to 1.8%, which is up from the 2009 lows of 1.3%, but  still far off from the 2.2%-2.3% sustained pre-crisis. In other words, we're halfway there.  The small business capex intentions rate is self-explanatory: pre-crisis it typically ran at about 31%-32%; during the crisis it bottomed out at around 17.5% and has since recovered to 24%.  In other words, just as with the quit rate, we're about halfway there. 

And there is an unexpected second factor allowing encouragement: it seems that Britain has stumbled on a form of recovery driven by a rise in employment which probably reflects human ingenuity responding to dire necessity. It seems wrong to credit any of Britain's policymakers with discovering this course – indeed, there is little sign they understand how and why it is happening.  And since such a supply-led recovery is a genuine novelty to Britain's policymakers, there's still every chance that they will snuff it out by tightening monetary policy in order to head off a 'overheating' which exists nowhere outside London's property market.  Nevertheless, if it is allowed to live, a supply-led recovery can be extremely durable, and it has been born and already reached its early years without the benefit of productivity-enhancing investment spending or any significant supply of credit. 

It is also possible that Britain's labour-led recovery may be replicated elsewhere in parts of Europe where there are few other grounds for hope – Spain for example. 

But the problem is that almost everywhere the world's cycle remains hostage to a financial system which, for varying reasons, remains profoundly dysfunctional. The key measurement here is monetary velocity – or GDP / M2.  It is worth taking a moment to imagine what this measures. M2 can be seen as the cash and bank deposits of households and corporations. A new deposit can be created essentially in only two ways: either they represent the balance sheet result of a new bank loan; or alternatively, it can represent what happens when you liquidate a real asset (a house, a diamond necklace) for cash.  The bank's function is to act as an intermediary to allocate those deposits to a purpose sufficiently productive to allow it to pay interest.  If monetary velocity is falling whilst M2 is growing, it means either that the banks are not distributing the savings at all, or they are allocating them extremely badly. 

It's still happening virtually everywhere. In the US, monetary velocity has sunk to lows not seen since at least 1959 (when my data starts), even as M2 rises to around 6.5%. The reason; in the 12m to May, deposits in US banks have risen by $783bn, but their loan books have risen only $324bn, which has cut the loan/deposit rate by 2.5pps to 75.6%. 

In the Eurozone, the decline in monetary velocity has slowed, but only because M2 growth has slowed so fast that nominal GDP has yet to catch up:  by April M2 growth had slowed to just 1.9% yoy, and unless positive momentum is restored, it will sink below 1% by the end of the year. Deposits in Eurozone banks fell by 0.8% yoy in April, or by Eu 95bn, whilst banks' loans books shrank by 3.3% yoy, or Eu402bn during the same period.  Such contraction managed to cut 2.7pps off the loan/deposit ratio, but it still stands at  104.7%. 

Where will it stop? US banks' pre-crisis loan/deposit ratio topped out in early 2008 at just over 102% - they are now 75.6% and are still falling. UK banks' ratio peaked out in late 2007 at 117.9% and have fallen to 92.6% and are still falling. Eurozone banks' stood at around 123% in early 2008, and have come down only to 104.7%.  They have a very long way to go. The Eurozone has a very long way to go. 

Britain's monetary velocity also continues to fall as banks continue to deleverage: in the year to April, banks' loans to the private sector fell £68bn whilst deposits rose £14.5bn, cutting banks' LDR by 3.4pps yoy to 92.6%.  

Where else are monetary velocities falling? Practically everywhere one looks: Japan, China, S Korea, Taiwan,Hong Kong etc. Perhaps the baleful truth is that in a global economy which is dominated by global capital flows, no economy entirely escapes unscathed when the developed world's banking systems are dysfunctional.  

Ever since encountering the idea in John Greenwood's Asian Monetary Monitor (then of GT) in the late 1980s that a universally-distributed system of money market mutuals might allocated capital more effectively than commercial banks, it has seemed to me that commercial banks are a fundamentally unnecessary form of commercial activity. It has also been my belief that something like that must arise out of the ashes of this crisis. We are waiting. 

NE Asia's Inventory-Related May Export Blip

The surprisingly weakness of NE Asia's May trade data is the result of a long-maturing unwanted inventory build up meeting Chinese financial constraints, and is happening despite the emerging improvement in underlying Western demand.  It's a temporary phenomenon which is likely to be answered later this year by a sharper-than-expected rise in NE Asian output and exports. 

The positive momentum which has been building quietly for months in both Northeast Asia exports and G3 imports, has taken a blow from May's NE Asia trade data.

• China's exports rose 6.9% yoy, which was only 0.1SD above historic seasonal trends; 
• S Korea's exports fell 0.9% yoy, which was 0.5SDs below historic seasonal trends; 
• Taiwan's rose 1.3% yoy, which was 0.7SDs below historic seasonal trends; 
• Japan's 20-day data points to a likely fall of 6.5% yoy in dollar terms, a full SD below trend. 

Taken together, this suggests NE Asia's exports rose only 2.8% yoy in May on a monthly movt which was 0.3SDs below historic seasonal trend. This is a considerable disappointment, and is a noticeable check to the build-up of momentum which had been emerging.

But it is an unusual weakness, because it is centred almost exclusively in inter-Asian trade. Thus, the real weaknesses in China's exports were in HK down 38.7% yoy, Asean down 5.4%, S Korea down 5.2%, Japan down 1.1%. But exports to the EU jumped 13.4% yoy and to the US exports rose 6.3%.

For S Korea, exports to Asia fell 6.5% yoy, with China down 7.5% and Asean down 9.1%, whilst exports to the EU jumped 23.8% yoy and rose 7.6% yoy to the US.
For Taiwan, the weaknesses were in Thailand down 8% yoy, Singapore down 3.6%,  S Korea down 0.2% whilst Japan rose only 2.6% and mainland China +3.1%. Meanwhile, exports to the UK rose 19.6% yoy, to Germany rose 9% and to the US rose 1%.

The check to inter-Asian trade is also the reason why, though exports were weak, they were much stronger than imports: China's imports fell 1.7% yoy on a monthly move which was half a standard deviation below historic trends; S Korea's imports rose just 0.3% yoy, which was 1.2SDs below trend; Taiwan's imports fell 2.3% yoy,  which was 1.7SDs below trend. Result? Northeast Asia's trade surpluses have burgeoned even as trade volumes slowed noticeably.


Now growth of G3 imports and NE Asian exports usually move in lockstep and have done so for years, with NE Asia's exports growing slightly (and predictably) faster than G3 imports. It is most unusual for them to underperform G3 imports, as the chart below shows – and when it happens it's normally a signal that Western demand is about to slow.  Yet it's happening now, at a time when the performance and prospects for G3 imports are the strongest they've been for two years, and accelerating.

So what's happening? What's happening in Qingdao Port's bonded warehouses gives a big hint. There, the inspectors are on the trail of allegedly fraudulent receipts for inventories of metals,  which are used as collateral to borrowing from Chinese and foreign banks.  There are suspicions that the same stock of inventory has been pledged for multiple loans. This is not what's surprising – frankly, one assumes this is standard operating procedure, with the only person pretending not to know being the banking officer authorising the loan. No, what's important is that the scandal has surfaced now, telling us, as it does, that the loans have defaulted.  The story, then, is that financing conditions are tight – so tight that inventories are being liquidated in order to raise cash.  

It's difficult to get the data to prove this is what's happening generally in China, but perhaps the weekly iron ore inventories tell the correct story: inventories built up sharply during the latter part of 2013 and the first half of 2014, but now appear to be peaking.

If this is the position in the mainland, then it is hardly likely that Taiwan's mainland operations are exempt from the practice or the financial pressure. And if so, one would expect less enthusiasm among Taiwanese suppliers to load their mainland operations with more supplies. 

South Korea provides the clearest example of a long-maturing build-up of inventory which is now reaching its peak. S Korea's inventory turnover index is a near-cousin of the more popular inventory/shipment ratio. As the chart shows, this ratio has been rising steadily since late 2009, and by April this year had reached a new peak. At some point, Korean companies will wish to stop that build-up: the trade data suggests that by May that point had been reached.

The one NE Asian country which quite clearly doesn't have an inventory problem is Japan, where conservative balance sheet management is sufficiently ingrained to provide a vigilant patrol on inventory levels. 

Conclusion? After waiting years for a pick-up in Western demand, and allowing inventories to build-up as they do so, Northeast Asia's industrial base has given up waiting, and, partly under pressure from China's financial constraints, have started liquidating those inventories just as Western demand is finally beginning to return.  For NE Asia this is resulting in a blip in trade. If Western demand continues to emerge, however, it is likely to be revoked later this year with accelerated production and inter-Asian trade. 

Japan 1Q Duponts: What's Changing, What's Not

The easiest bull argument to make for Japan in the Abenomics era has been that if the economy can generate some nominal topline growth, whether achieved by currency depreciation or by a successfully aggressive monetary policy, or simply by overturning deeply ingrained deflationary expectations, then the resulting rise in asset turns would power a spectacular rise in return on capital.

The MOF's quarterly survey of private sector balance sheets and p&ls shows  accelerating topline gains and also sharp upturns in ROE and ROA, but for not for the reasons expected. Topline gains there have been – sales rose 5.6% yoy in 1Q - but corporate Japan's response has been to prioritize continued deleveraging over re-investment, and to focus profits-generating efforts on wage control.

Investment in plant and equipment rose 7.4% yoy, a sharper rise than expected, and the strongest since 2Q12. However, in absolute terms, the Y12.231tr spent on plant and equipment was rather less than the Y14.485tr fall in net debt during the same period, and only slightly more than the Y10.569tr in depreciation expenses. Whilst the rise in investment spending is of course to be welcomed, it is probably not the turning point in corporate behaviour which Abenomics is looking for.

Gains are certainly being made in ROE & ROA: operating profits rose 18.8% yoy whilst net worth rose only 4.3%,  which pushed ROE for the quarter reached 3%, the highest it has been since 1Q08.  Similarly, with total assets rising only 1.8% yoy, it was the strongest quarter for ROA since 1Q07, and the best on a 12m basis since mid-2008.

At the core of this was an improvement in operating margins: sales rose 5.6% yoy whilst operating profits rose 28.8%, which pushed OPM to 4.5%, the highest since the bubble years, with the 12m rise similarly spectacular.

How did it  happen? On a 12m basis, OPM rose 68bps yoy to 3.98%. This happened despite cost of goods sold actually rising by 7bps during the same time: the whole of this was counteracted by a 75bp fall in SG&A.  And drilling down further, the whole of that was accounted for by a 79bp fall in personnel expenses/sales to 12.6%. 

Essentially it boils down to this: on a 12m basis, sales per employee rose 7.2% yoy 12ma, whilst total expenses per employee rose only 5.5%. This took the multiple of sales/expenses per employee to 7.94x in 1Q14, and to 7.71x on a 12m basis.  As the chart shows, this multiple is still below its pre-crisis peak, and we should expect corporate Japan to continue to strive to raise this ratio, even if this means that wage growth is suppressed beneath inflation rates. 

The rise in sales also lifted asset turns (sales/assets) mildly, but at only 0.952x this remains extremely low by any standards, including Japan's own recent history – the average since 2000 is 1.03x.   Balance sheet management remains remarkably conservative, with financial leverage falling to a new low of 2.7x, with net debt falling 2.6% yoy, and net debt/equity falling to a new low of 55.2%. There is no sign of any change in this aspect of corporate behaviour. 

So, Mr Draghi, What Will It Take Now?

Having talked up the ECB's willingness to exert itself to drag the Eurozone away from the deflation danger-zone, it is difficult to imagine what Mr Draghi and colleagues can come up with this week which the markets have not already discounted. (If so, perhaps the ECB's best bet is to do nothing and watch the currency slide in disappointment.)
The two most widely trailed proposed actions are:

i) to slap negative interest rates on deposits which the Eurozone's commercial banks keep lodged with the ECB;
ii) to engineer some sort of funding program for banks, in which preferential interest rates are linked to specific lending targets. 

Both sound good, but both have problems which will render them disappointing and even if not absolutely ineffective.

Imposing negative interest rates on commercial banks' deposits kept with the ECB sounds good, with the promise that these funds will necessarily be driven into risk assets which would otherwise be unfunded. But the policy faces two problems. First, it is mostly too late, because banks have already run down these deposits. Looking at the ECB's weekly balance sheet, we find that banks have only Eu161.2bn of deposits in the ECB which are not needed to cover their reserves ratios. That may seem a lot, but in fact the total has retreated right back to pre-crisis levels:  in January 2010, for example, the average was Eu189.5bn.  The belief that these deposits are a large source of idle funds which may be mobilized stems back to the months of the immediate crisis, when the topped Eu1tr. But those days are long past: that bird has flown. 

But even if this were not the case, the policy would face a second difficulty: were ECB to impose punitive negative interest rates in a bid to drive this money into risk assets, the simplest and safest response by commercial banks would simply be to cut their borrowing from ECB by a similar amount. The latest weekly data shows ECB is currently lending Eu640bn to the Eurozone banking system, a total which has already fallen by Eu195.4bn, or 23.4%, during the last 12 months. Rather than pay interest on those deposits, why not use the money merely to repay the ECB? If commercial banks chose that path, there would be no first order impact on risk assets at all. 

The second proposed policy, offering banks preferential funding rates tied to lending targets, sounds more promising. More, the Bank of England has trialled one of these schemes in the UK, under the Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS), so is not a complete leap into the conceptual dark, and some may assume that it has contributed to the UK's recovery (almost certainly wrongly). But the British experience highlights why any similar Eurozone scheme is likely to labour hard to achieve little. The FLS was launched by the Bank of England the UK Treasury in July 2012, initially for a period limited to end-2013, but subsequently extended in 2014 for a further year. By the end of 1Q2014, some £43.3bn had been lent under this scheme, equivalent to just 2.2% of the UK total sterling bank lending to the private sector. But by now, the scheme is actually shrinking: the total lent fell by £2.66bn during 1Q. More, the scheme has not stopped Britain's deleveraging: in the 12m to March 2014, total lending, including FLS, fell by £67.97bn.

The problem, as the Bank acknowledges is that the problem which FLS was meant to deal with – prohibitive credit spreads – has disappeared in the UK. At its launch in July 2012, the Bank assumed that household and corporate credit spreads would tighten by around 100bps; in fact, by the end of 2013, spreads for households had tightened by about that, but spreads for corporates had come in around 150bps. Since then, spreads have continued to tighten.

The Bank comments: 'It is difficult to assess the Scheme's contribution. . . because of the impossibility of knowing what would have happened in its absence. In the year prior to the launch of the FLS, UK banks' funding costs had risen, in large part because of developments in the euro area. As well as the FLS, subsequent falls in banks' funding costs are likely to have reflected other economic developments and policy initiatives at home and abroad: in particular, comments made the President of the ECB in July 2012 and the subsequent announcement of Outright Monetary Transactions are likely to have played a role, and so reduced UK banks' need to access funding through the FLS; in their absence, it is probable that the FLS would have been more heavily used'.

In other words, the FLS itself was stymied by actions already taken by the ECB.  How much more true will this be for any similar scheme launched by the ECB now. Credit spreads have tightened so dramatically since 2012 that it is difficult to imagine that the ECB's offer of preferential funding can be made to appear sufficient incentive to alter banks' lending policies – even in the event that they can discover an appetite to borrow. In fact, right now, the spread between Euro 10yr sovereigns and BBB credits has closed to under a percentage point – the lowest since at least 2008.  That bird, too, has flown.

The fundamental problem Mr Draghi faces, of course, is that there is a limit to what monetary policy alone can do to address problems caused by economies having both the wrong currency, and the wrong fiscal policy. Sadly, that bird cannot be asked to perform. 

US: The Best Way to Shrink

If you've got to have a ghastly downward revision that puts US 1Q GDP shrinking at an annualized 1%, this is probably the best sort you have any right to expect. Three things stand out: I) the central role of inventories; ii) the upward revisions for the core private spending categories; and iii) this sort of slowdown does little damage to the grounds for expecting a cyclical acceleration in investment spending. In addition,  monthly data suggests this capital goods cycle is already quietly underway.

Inventories. The bulk of the downward revision, enough to account for the entire contraction, comes from a single source –  inventory adjustments. The slower pace of private inventory build-ups stripped 1.62 percentage points from GDP growth, compared with 57bps in the advance estimate. By itself, this change is responsible for the entire GDP contraction.  Now the thing about inventory movements is that they regularly do have a significant impact on quarterly GDP results, but that their volatilities tend to be answered rather quickly by equal and opposite volatilities.   Since 2000, the average contribution of private inventory movements to quarterly annualized GDP growth has been a fall of just 1bp, but the standard deviation of such movements is . . . 1.48 percentage points.   We can and should expect private inventory movements to rebound, and quickly, at least in terms of its contribution to GDP growth.

It should also be said that the inventory fall recorded in the GDP data is surprisingly large: additions to wholesalers' inventories slowed 12.7% qoq ,  whilst additions to manufacturers' and trade inventories slowed 19.5%, whilst the GDP estimates record a 52% qoq slowdown in nominal terms, and 56% in real terms.

Revised Up: Investment & Consumption Spending. Meanwhile, the core private sector spending categories were revised up, narrowly. Non-residential investment spending was revised up to an annualized fall of 1.6% from an initial estimate of 2.1%, and residential investment was revised up to minus 5.1% from an initial minus 5.7%.  To put these falls into context, they stripped only 36bps from growth.  Private consumption spending was revised up to 3.1% from the initial 3%, and added 2.09% to growth.  

The third thing to emphasise is that this blip in 1Q's GDP has had virtually no implications for the US cycle: even factoring in the 1Q decline, my ROC directional indicator (which expresses nominal GDP as an income stream from a stock of fixed capital, which in turn is estimated by depreciating all fixed capital spending over a 10yr period), continues to be at the high end of the range of the last 30 years.  Even after factoring in the declines of 1Q, private gross fixed capital formation is still running at 5.5% a year in nominal terms, and 3.2% in real terms. There is no reason not to expect this to re-accelerate throughout the year.

The Capital Goods Cycle is Turning. In fact, April's monthly data for orders and shipments of capital goods (nondef ex-air), provided some evidence  that this acceleration is already underway. This was not immediately obvious, since orders fell 1.2% mom – which was worse than expected. But that fall disguised an underlying  recovery which looks distinctly like a turning point. In fact, both orders and shipments of capital goods nondef ex-air are currently rising more rapidly than they have since around 2011, once one strips out the early 2013 rebound from the orders slump in 2H12.  That's partly because of the size of the revisions: March's total for orders, for example, was revised up to +4.7% mom from a preliminary 2.2%; the total for shipments was upped to 2.1% from the original 1%. Previous months were also upgrade, albeit less dramatically. The upshot is that when you look at the nominal dollar numbers, the breakout from previous levels for both orders and shipments is quite unmistakeable. 

And it is backed up by a further indicator: constructing a book-to-bill ratio for these capital goods, you find a sharp reversal from the rather threatening decline seen between Sept and Feb. Right now, the 1.03x ratio is 0.6SDs above the long term average and has recovered back to levels commonly held pre-crisis. 

Regardless of this, it will be hard for the the annual GDP growth tally for 2014 to recover to the 2.7%-2.8% which seemed likely at the beginning of the year. Nevertheless, whether you forecast GDP by looking at the various expenditure categories, or whether you take a production function input-based approach, the swing factor in this year's US GDP (ie, the difference between 2.7-2.8% and c3%+) was always going to be a long-predicted and long-overdue capital goods cycle. And it seems likely that, once this weather-afflicted quarter is stripped out, a modest acceleration can still be expected.