The simple macroeconomics of North and South in EMU. Bruegel Working Paper 2012/12, 30 July 2012

The euro area today consists of a competitive, moderately leveraged North and an uncompetitive, over-indebted South. Its main macroeconomic challenge is to carry out the adjustment required to restore the competitiveness of its southern part and eliminate its excessive public and private debt burden. This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal and competitiveness adjustment in a stylised model with two countries in a monetary union, North and South. To restore competitiveness, South implements a more restrictive fiscal policy than North. We consider two scenarios. In the first, monetary policy aims at keeping inflation constant in the North. The South therefore needs to deflate to regain competitiveness, which worsens the debt dynamics. In the second, monetary policy aims at keeping inflation constant in the monetary union as a whole. This results in more monetary stimulus, inflation in the North is higher, and this in turn helps the debt dynamics in the South. Our main findings are: •The differential fiscal stance between North and South is what determines real exchange rate changes. South therefore needs to tighten more. There is no escape from relative austerity. •If monetary policy aims at keeping inflation stable in the North and the initial debt is above a certain threshold, debt dynamics are perverse: fiscal retrenchment is self-defeating; •If monetary policy targets average inflation instead, which implies higher inflation in the North, the initial debt threshold above which the debt dynamics become perverse is higher. Accepting more inflation at home is therefore a way for the North to contribute to restoring debt sustainability in the South. •Structural reforms in the South improve the debt dynamics if the initial debt is not too high. Again, targeting average inflation rather than inflation in the North helps strengthen the favourable effects of structural reforms.

Banking Union with a Sovereign Virus. The self-serving regulatory treatment of sovereign debt in the euro area. CEPS Policy Brief No. 289, 27 March 2013

In many eurozone countries, domestic banks often hold more than 20% of domestic public debt, which is an unsatisfactory situation given that banks are highly leveraged and that sovereign debt is inherently subject to default risk within the euro area. This paper by Daniel Gros finds, however, that the relative concentration of public debt on bank balance sheets is not just a result of the euro crisis, for there are strong additional incentives for banks in some countries to increase their sovereign. His contribution discusses a number of these regulatory incentives – the most important of which is specific to the euro area – and explores ways in which euro area banks can be weaned from massive investments in government bonds.

Falling short of expectations? Stress-testing the European banking system. CEPS Policy Brief No. 315, 15 January 2014

Before the ECB takes over responsibility for overseeing Europe’s largest banks, as foreseen in the establishment of a eurozone banking union, it plans to conduct an Asset Quality Review (AQR) throughout the coming year, which will identify the capital shortfalls of these banks. This study finds that a comprehensive and decisive AQR will most likely reveal a substantial lack of capital in many peripheral and core European banks. The authors provide estimates of the capital shortfalls of banks that will be stress-tested under the AQR using publicly available data and a series of shortfall measures. Their analysis identifies which banks will most likely need capital, where a public back stop is likely to be needed and, since many countries are already highly leveraged, where an EU-wide backstop might be necessary.

Was the ECB’s Comprehensive Assessment up to standard? CEPS Policy Brief No. 325, 10 November 2014

The Comprehensive Assessment conducted by the European Central Bank (ECB) represents a considerable step forward in enhancing transparency in euro-area banks’ balance sheets. The most notable progress since the previous European stress test has been the harmonisation of the definition of non-performing loans and other concepts as well as uncovering hidden losses, which resulted in a €34 billion aggregate capital-charge net of taxes. Despite this tightening, most banks were able to meet the 5.5% common equity tier 1 (CET1) threshold applied in the test, which suggests that the large majority of the euro-area banks have improved their financial position sufficiently that they should no longer be constrained in financing the economy. As shown in this CEPS Policy Brief by Willem Pieter de Groen, however, the detailed results provide a more nuanced picture: there remain a large number of the banks in the euro area that are still highly leveraged and in many cases unable to meet the regulatory capital requirements that will be introduced in the coming years under the adverse stress test scenario.

The Penetration of Financial Instability in Agricultural Credit and Leveraging. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 2, September 2011

This paper describes the aggregate rural capital markets of the EU and the main differences between the markets of its member countries. The results of our study suggest that the agricultural credit markets are still quite segmented and the segments are country- rather than currency- or region specific. Financial instability in Europe is also penetrating the agricultural sector and the variation of interest rates for agricultural credit is increasing across countries. Perhaps the most dramatic signal of growing financial instability is that the financial leverage (gearing rate) of European farms rose in 2008 by almost 4 percentage points, from 14 to 18%. The 4 percentage-point annual rise was twice the 2 percentage-point rise observed during the economic recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The distribution of the financial leverage of agriculture across countries does not, however, reflect the distribution of country-specific risk premiums in the manner that they are observed in government bond yields. Therefore, in those countries that have the weakest financial situation in the public sector and in which the bond markets are encumbered with high country-specific risk premiums, the agricultural sector is not directly exposed to a very large risk of increasing interest rates, since it is not so highly leveraged. For example in Greek and Spanish agriculture, the financial leverage (gearing) rate is only 0.6% and 2.2% respectively, while the highest gearing rates are found elsewhere (in Denmark), reaching 50%.