Portugal to need "debt haircut" as economy tips into Grecian downward spiral

 Demonstrators on the streets of Lisbon: Portugal has so far avoided the sorts of riots seen in Greece, but patience is wearing thin. 

Yields on Portugal's 10-year bonds climbed to 14.39pc on Thursday. Credit default swaps measuring bond risk have reached 1270 points, pricing a two-thirds chance of default over the next five years.

While some of the latest damage reflects forced selling of Portuguese debt after Standard & Poor's cut the country's credit rating to junk status last Friday, there are deeper worries that sharp fiscal cuts by the free-market government of Pedro Passos Coelho may prove self-defeating.

Mr Passos Coelho has been praised by EU leaders and the International Monetary Fund for delivering on austerity, but the risk is that severe tightening - without offsetting monetary and exchange stimulus - will push Portugal into the same downward spiral that has already engulfed Greece.

Jurgen Michels, Europe economist at Citigroup, said Portugal's economy will contract by a further 5.8pc this year and by 3.7pc in 2013, a far sharper decline than official forecasts. The peak-to-trough collapse would be 13pc, a full-fledged depression.

"As this gets worse it is going to be extremely difficult to go ahead with more austerity measures: political contagion will start to come through," he said.

Portugal has so far reacted calmly. It has avoided the sorts of riots seen in Greece, but patience is wearing thin. The CGTP labour federation held a protest march in Lisbon this week, vowing to resist "forced labour".

A new study by the Barometer for Democracy shows that confidence in Portugal's democracy has fallen to the lowest since the end of the Salazar dictatorship. Barely more than half retain faith in the system and 15pc pine for "authoritarian" rule.

While Portugal's public debt of 113pc of GDP is lower than Greece's, the private sector has much larger debts and the country's total debt-load is higher at 360pc of GDP - much of it external debt.

"There is huge private sector deleveraging going on and the banking system has big problems. It is unclear how much of this private debt is going to end up on the state's door-step," said Mr Michels.

"Without a sizeable haircut to its debt stock, Portugal will not be able to move into a viable fiscal path. We expect a haircut of 35pc at the end of 2012 or in 2013."

Portugal's Treasury faces modest debt repayment of €17bn this year. There is no imminent crisis since Lisbon is already under an EU-ECB-IMF Troika regime as part of its €78bn rescue and does not need to access markets until 2013.

The problem is the slow-burn threat of debt-deflation. Interest costs for Portuguese companies are painfully high - if they can roll over loans at all - and the debt burden is rising on a shrinking economic base. Real M1 money deposits contracted at an annual rate near 20pc in the second half of 2011.

Since the country cannot devalue within EMU, it hopes to achieve an "internal devaluation" to restore 30pc in lost competitiveness against Germany. This is a gruelling process, entailing cuts that eat away at tax revenue.

Portugal is a troubling case for EU officials, who insist that Greece is a "one-off" case rather than the first of a string of countries trapped in a deeper North-South structural rift. The official line is that Portugal will pull through because it has grasped the nettle of retrenchment and reform.

Europe's leaders have vowed that there will be no forced "haircuts" for holders of Portuguese bonds. If the country now spirals into a Grecian vortex as well they will have to repudiate that promise or accept that EU taxpayers will have to shoulder the burden of debt restructuring.

While all eyes are on Greece, it is the slower drama in Portugal that will ultimately determine the fate of the eurozone.

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Germany fuels EMU debt crisis with haircut demands

The German document said "collective action clauses" (CAC) should be introduced into all EMU bonds issued from next year. These clauses open the way for creditor haircuts in cases where countries need a rescue.

The planned date is even sooner than the 2013 target announced by EU leaders in October's summit, which itself came as a nasty shock to the bond markets. It gives the eurozone's struggling debtors far less time to clear up their public finances. The plans will be aired at the EU summit in December.

Elena Salgado, Spain's finance minister, warned Germany that the proposal risked making matters worse at a delicate moment. "We don't think this idea is quite appropriate right now, including after 2013," she said.

Mrs Salgado said there was "an abyss" separating her country from Ireland and Greece. "We have a solid financial sector. Austerity and reforms are producing exactly the results we forecast," she said, insisting that the country was the victim of a "speculative attack".

However, iFlow data from the Bank of New York Mellon shows a major withdrawal of foreign funds from Spanish debt markets, mostly coming from "real money" investors. "The flows look rather similar to what we saw in Greece," said Neil Mellor, the bank's currency strategist.

Portugal had the added strain on Wednesday of a near total shutdown of its airports, harbours, trains and buses as unions launched their first general strike in 22 years, protesting against the latest austerity budget and wage cuts of 5pc for public workers.

"Sacrifices by workers is not the way out of the crisis," said Manuel Carvalho da Silva, of Portugal's CGTP union, echoing a refrain now heard in a string of European countries.

Jürgen Michels from Citigroup said Germany's haircut proposals would make it much harder for struggling Club Med states to raise money, risking a self-fulfilling crisis. "Portugal and Spain would be probably forced to tap the current European Financial Stability Facility, which could bring the facility to its limit and even exceed it," he warned.

Mr Michels said the results would be so destructive that Germany is unlikely to win EU backing for the idea.

However, Chancellor Angela Merkel has already announced that she will "not back down" on demands for creditor pain. In an odd statement this week she said investors had made money "speculating on the bankruptcy of countries" and must now share the burden of rescue costs.

Critics say Mrs Merkel seems unwilling to acknowledge the difference between two vastly different types of players: hedge funds who are "short" eurozone debt and therefore stand to benefit from her policy; and the pension funds, life insurers and savers (many of them German) who bought southern European and Irish debt in good faith and now stand to lose.

There is confusion in the markets over how different types of debt will be treated. The Irish government has already enforced an 80pc haircut on the junior debt of Anglo Irish Bank but insists that senior debt is sacrosanct. That guarantee is now worthless since Fianna Fail is certain to lose the election in January.

Opposition leaders have not clarified how they will handle the issue. However, it is becoming ever harder to explain to the Irish people why they should suffer austerity in order to ensure that foreign holders of damaged Irish bank debt should lose nothing. The country's Labour Party already favours burden-sharing. The concern is that once Ireland cracks on senior debt, the dam will break across Europe.

Greg Gibbs from RBS said the European Central Bank (ECB) had helped cause the latest eurozone eruption by draining liquidity too soon and signalling that it aimed to end the "addiction" of struggling Irish and Club Med banks to its cheap funding window sooner rather than later.

"This tough stance is reigniting a eurozone debt crisis. The ECB needs to rethink its plans," he said. The RBS team said the central bank should dramatically increase its purchase of eurozone debt, especially Spanish debt, starting with €100bn sovereign and corporate bonds.

José Luis Martínez Campuzano, Citigroup's economist in Spain, also faulted the ECB for letting matters get out of hand. "We have a situation where bodies that should be playing a key role are sitting on the sidelines repeating messages that have little to do with reality and the true risks ahead. That is the case with the ECB," he said.

However, it is unclear whether the ECB has the firepower – or the legal mandate – to carry out the sort of bond purchases seen in the US, where the US government stands behind the Federal Reserve.

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EU 'haircut' plans rattle bondholders

Front row left to right, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Lithuania's President Dalia Grybauskaite. Back row left to right, Portugal's Prime Minister Jose Socrates and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the EU summit in Brussels Photo: AP

Germany has agreed to give the EU's €440bn (£383bn) bail-out fund permanent status rather than letting it expire in 2013 as planned, but only as part of a "Crisis Resolution Mechanism" that forces bondholders to share losses from any future bail-outs. The fund must be anchored in EU law through changes to the Treaties in order to head off legal challenges at Germany's constitutional court.

A draft proposal from Berlin – now serving as a working text for the European Commission – calls for "orderly insolvency" by eurozone countries in trouble. Details are sketchy but this "Chapter 11" for sovereign states would include an extension of debt maturities, a "holiday" on interest payments for as long as needed to let debtors recover, and a suspension of bondholder rights. The blueprint is akin to debt-restucturing schemes used by the International Monetary Fund.

Under a Finnish proposal, there are likely to be "Collective Action Clauses" in all new bond issues to prevent minority bondholders blocking a default deal.

European President Herman van Rompuy will be tasked to draw up a blueprint for the crisis mechanism. There may also be a Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM).

Berlin is determined to avoid a repeat of the €110bn bailout for Greece when banks were shielded from losses, leaving eurozone taxpayers facing the full cost.

Silvio Peruzzo, Europe economist at RBS, said talk of "haircuts" for bondholder at this delicate juncture could backfire. "The debt crisis in the eurozone periphery has not been sorted out. These countries need markets to keep buying the bonds, but investors are going to stay away if you open the door to private sector pain," he said.

It is unclear whether the latest bond jitters in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal is linked to growing awareness of the German plans. Each country has its own troubles. Yields on Ireland's 10-year bonds briefly rose to a post-EMU high above 7pc on Thursday, partly due to a stand-off between Dublin and angry funds facing losses on the junior debt of Anglo Irish Bank.

However, EU officials fear that the proposals could make it harder for high-debt states to tap debt markets, risking a self-fulfilling crisis.

Germany is likely to win backing in principle at Friday's EU summit in Brussels since it has already struck a deal with France, and Britain has dropped its opposition to treaty changes.

Brussels believes it is possible to invoke Article 48.6, which allows changes to the Lisbon Treaty without the political trauma of referenda or full ratification in all 27 states. This "simplified revision" can be used to cover matters in Part III of the Treaty, but the EU risks a political backlash if it tries to push through such a controversial plan by these means. Viviane Reding, the EU justice commissioner, said it was "suicidal" to tinker with the treaties so soon after the Lisbon storm.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also demanding EU powers to strip countries of their voting rights if they breach eurozone rules, but this has been dismissed by Brussels as "totally unacceptable" and will be blocked by other states.

The summit was intended to endorse plans by an EU taskforce for a beefed-up Stability Pact, but as so often at EU meetings France and Germany have run away with the agenda.

The German proposals have a logic since they let struggling states claw their way out crisis by reducing debt. Greece's rescue risks failure because it will leave the country with public debt of 150pc of GDP, near the point of no return.

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