Having picked a new prime minister to replace Matteo Renzi, when as reported this morning Italian president Sergio Mattarella asked Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni, a loyalist from Renzi’s Democratic Party, to form a new government, the chaos surrounding Italy’s political future appears to be subsiding, which as we said this morning, is welcome news for the future of Monte Paschi, as Italy’s third largest bank may once again avoid a state bailout should enough private investors turn up and inject funds into the failing financial institution, the world’s oldest.

So it comes as no surprise that, facing a third nationalization in just a few years, Bloomberg reports that Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena plans to step up efforts to win investors for a debt-for-equity swap in the coming days, and will once again press ahead with a €5 billion capital raise to avoid a state rescue that would impose losses on bondholders and shareholders, an outcome the ECB suggested on Friday would be unavoidable absent a private sector rescue.

Bloomberg adds that the bank’s board is meeting Sunday to review a fresh offer for note holders that would allow more retail investors to participate after money managers already swapped €1.02b, although it remains unclear why more investors would take on the bank’s offer.

Following the swap, a stock sale to an anchor investor and a public share placement would follow, to complete the full capital raise.

Meanwhile, Reuters writes that Monte Paschi was “scrambling on Sunday to thrash out a last-ditch plan to raise €5 billion on the market by year-end after the European Central Bank refused to give it more time to recapitalize.” Rome is ready to intervene with an emergency decree to rescue the bank if needed, a government source said on Friday. Such an intervention would impose losses on bondholders as per European bail-in regulations.

A major wildcard is whether Qatar, long seen as an anchor investor would provide as much as €1 billion in fresh capital. Under the plan, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund could put in another 1 billion euros, while a consortium of banks would try sell shares for the remainder in the market but without underwriting the issue, a senior banking source said.

As Monte dei Paschi’s board met on Sunday, a source close to the board said the fact that Gentiloni had been asked to form a government gave the bank confidence it could still pull off the privately funded capital raise. “There’s still time. Qatar is in the game and available to put in the amount that is being talked about,” the source said.

The Reuters source added the bank had been in contact with Consob since Friday to discuss the reopening of the debt swap, a politically sensitive move that could expose the lender and the market watchdog to accusations of bending the rules.

Some more details:

  Another source said no decision would be taken before the ECB formally communicates its rejection of the bank’s request for an extension, which should happen early this week. According to the senior banker, the lender would argue that under European rules, retail investors risked losing all their money if the state had to intervene, so they would be better off converting their bonds.

The bank’s fate is a political hot potato in Italy.

The Monte Paschi rescue has become a political hot potato topic: Luigi Di Maio, a leader of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement that is ahead in opinion polls, said on Sunday the bank should be nationalized while accusing Renzi’s Democratic Party (PD) of using the crisis to rebuff calls for snap polls and justify the need for a quick, unelected government.

PD Chairman Matteo Orfini said: “The market solution is the best. Should it not succeed, the bank must be stabilized while respecting EU rules.”

That said, if indeed the flux surrounding the fate of the Italian government has been resolved, Monte Paschi may just have avoided yet another nationalization if only for the time being. As for Qatar making any return on its €1 billion investment, funds which will promptly be soaked up by even more bad debt losses, we wouldn’t hold our breath.

Submitted by Alasdair Macloed via GoldMoney.com,

The latest consequence of economic mismanagement in Europe was the failed attempt at constitutional reform in Italy this week.

The Italian people have had enough of their government’s economic failure, and is refusing to give it more power.

The EU and the euro project have been an economic disaster for all participants, including Germany, which will eventually be forced to write off the hard-earned savings she has lent to other Eurozone members. We know, with absolute certainty, that the euro will self-destruct and the Eurozone will disintegrate.

We know this for one reason above all. The political class and the ECB are guided by economic beliefs – I cannot dignify them by calling them reasoned theory – which will guarantee this outcome. Furthermore, they insist on using statistics that are incorrect for the stated function, the best example being GDP, which I have criticised endlessly and won’t repeat here. Furthermore, the numbers are misrepresented by government statisticians, CPI and unemployment figures being prime examples.

This article takes a column written by William Hague for the Daily Telegraph published earlier this week to illustrate the depths of misunderstanding even a relatively enlightened politician suffers, with this mix of nonsense and statistical propagandaⁱ. This article also refers to a speech delivered this week in Liverpool by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, showing how out of touch with reality he is as well. Many of his and Lord Hague’s misconceptions are shared by almost everyone, so for the most part go unnoticed.

Lord Hague basically blames the euro for all Europe’s ills: “…… it has made some countries, like Italy and Greece, poorer while others get richer”, he opines, and it is certainly a common sentiment. But it is never the currency that’s to blame, but those that attempt to use it to achieve policy outcomes, and inevitably fail in their quest.

Before the euro came into existence, different currencies offered different interest rates, reflecting the market’s appraisal of lending risk. So, the Greek government, borrowing in drachmas, would typically have to pay over 12% interest, while Germany might pay 3% for the same maturity in marks. The fact that there were differing rates in different currencies imposed market discipline on borrowers.

After the introduction of the euro, interest rates for sovereign borrowers converged towards the lowest rate, which was Germany’s. The reason for this was banks could gear up their lending in the bond and money markets to make easy money from the spread between German rates and the others, risk-free on the assumption that the whole caboodle was guaranteed by the EU and the ECB. It was perfectly reasonable to expect this outcome, but whether the panjandrums in Brussels were smart enough to know this would happen is not clear. If they were, they displayed ignorance of the eventual consequences, and if not, they were simply ignorant, full stop.

These same operatives bent the rules they themselves had originally set to allow countries to join the euro. Under the Maastricht Treaty, budget deficits were to have been less than 3% and government debt to GDP less than 60% for a state to qualify for membership. Neither Germany nor France qualified at the outset. And when it came to Greece, the Greek government simply lied, with the full knowledge and encouragement of the other members. No, Lord Hague, it was the policy makers that were at fault, not the currency itself.

But he continues: “Membership of the euro has put the Italians on a permanent path to being poorer”. Not so. It was the Italians who used cheap euro-denominated money to borrow profligately. They, and they alone are responsible for the mismanagement of their economy and their debt problems, which incidentally now exceed the Maastricht 60% limit by a further 75%.

So, who is policing that?

Lord Hague also trots out the canard about how the euro benefits Germany: “Germans keep exporting easily and running up a surplus, while the Italians struggle and go deeper into debt”. This statement in quotes is undoubtedly true on face value, but it is wrong to blame the poor euro. Instead, the blame lies with fiscal imbalances, relative rates of bank credit expansion, and the additional horror of TARGET2. This last artifice is intended to even out the monetary imbalances that would otherwise occur from trade imbalances. But its designers seem to have been completely unaware that the only way trade imbalances can be controlled is through the money shortages and accumulations that result from trade deficits and surpluses respectively. Instead, TARGET2 makes good the money deficiency that results from excess imports, and reduces the money surplus that accumulates in the hands of the exporters. It recycles the money spent by Italians so that it can be spent again, or even hoarded outside Italy, ad infinitum. TARGET2 is living proof of the ridiculousness behind the euro project.

Lord Hague provides an exception to his argument and conclusion, by citing Germany’s greater productivity and suggesting that the only way out was for Mr Renzi to enact bold reforms to raise Italian productivity to the same level as Germany’s. He doesn’t say what these reforms might be. I can tell him: the new government should downsize from 52% of GDP to less than 40%, the lower the better. The redeployment of capital from government destruction to private sector progression will work wonders. Tax policies should favour savers. At the same time, ordinary Italians should be allowed to get on with their lives and made to understand the state is not there to support them with handouts.

Finally, Lord Hague’s conclusion, while correct legally, is incorrect from a strictly economic point of view. He states that leaving the euro is a far more difficult problem than leaving the EU, there being no Article 50 to trigger. He implies that if Italy simply returns to the lira, there can be little doubt that it will rapidly collapse taking its banks with it, because Italy’s creditors will still expect to be repaid in euros while the cost of borrowing in lira is bound to increase rapidly, undermining government finances.

However, contrary to everything Keynesians have been taught and in turn teach gullible students, the economic objective of monetary independance should be sound money, not continual depreciation. Italy has enough gold to arrange a gold exchange standard for herself, or alternatively she could run a currency board with the euro, to ensure the lira retains value for foreign creditors. Either course requires something novel from Italian politicians: they must bite the bullet on government finances and permit capital to be redeployed from moribund businesses to new dynamic entrepreneurial activities. It can be done, and Italy would rapidly emerge as a new industrial force.

But will it be done? Sadly, there’s not a snowball in hell’s chance, and here we must agree with Lord Hague. In common with their opposite numbers everywhere else, Italian politicians have surrounded themselves with economic yes-men, trained at the expense of the state to justify state interventions in the economy. It has become a feed-back loop that ultimately concludes with economic instability, crisis and eventual collapse.

Carney’s groupthink

Lord Hague, while respected as a senior British politician is at least not involved in Italy’s monetary or fiscal policies. Far more dangerous potentially is someone with his hand on the monetary tiller, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England. This week he made a speech in Liverpool, which put the blame for the failure of his monetary policies on everyone but the Bankⁱⁱ. He said politicians need to foster a globalisation that works for all. Really? How are they going to do that? He blames economists for been at fault for not recognising “the realities of uneven gains from trade and technology”. But surely, we all know that establishment economists, including the Bank’s own, have an unrivalled track record of getting things wrong. To expect them to suddenly exhibit forecasting prescience is Carney’s personal triumph of hope over reality. Carney berates companies for not paying tax. This is the classic “someone else’s fault” line, and ignores the easily proven fact that money deployed by the private sector in pursuit of profit is productive, while giving it to government is wasteful. More tax paid may be desired by the state, but it is anti-productive.

The Governor then claims the Bank’s monetary policy has been “highly effective” and that “the data do not support the idea that the period of low rates has benefited the wealthy at the expense of the least wealthy.” He has obviously been unable to make the connection between the falling purchasing power of fixed salaries for the low paid and for pensioners relying on interest income, while stock markets roar to all-time highs on the back of suppressed interest rates and injections of money through quantitative easing. Yes, Mr Carney, my middle-class friends have done very well out of their investments and property, thanks to monetary inflation, but they still pay their gardeners and maids roughly the same depreciated wages.

This is relevant not only to the mismanagement of the UK’s economy, but also that of Europe. Carney attracted considerable criticism, rightly, for falsely threatening economic hell and damnation in the event of a vote for Brexit. This presupposes that everything in Europe is considerably better than for Britain on its own, and confirms that his opposite numbers in Europe, who were pushing the same line, have as much grasp of the economic situation as he has. Carney got this as wrong as he possibly could, but there’s no mea maxima culpa.

If Mr Carney and Lord Hague want to criticise current economic events, they should start by properly understanding the negative effects of fiscal and monetary intervention. They should realise that propping up defunct enterprises by lowering the cost of borrowing and supporting them with government contracts is Luddite and destructive. And above all, they should realise that ordinary people going about their business are infinitely adaptable, have an ability to withstand government and central bank silliness to a remarkable degree, and would deliver their taxes much more effectively if they were simply allowed to just get on with their business without having to suffer from government and central bank micro-management.