Simela Pantzartzi/European Pressphoto AgencyThe markets had a tepid response to Greece’s pivotal election.
If you want to be scared, truly terrified, listen to Mark J. Grant. He might be right.
For the last two years, Mr. Grant, a managing director based in Florida at a regional investment bank, has been predicting the bankruptcy of Greece and a cascade of chaos across the global economy, attracting quite a following on Wall Street in the process.
“Greece will be forced to return to the drachma and devalue, and the default will cause bank runs and money flowing into Germany and the United States as the only viable safe haven bets,” he declared the day before Sunday’s Greek elections, irrespective of which party would win. “Greece will default because there is no other choice regardless of anyone’s politics.”
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He then walked through the falling dominoes: “It will hit the (European Central Bank), the banks on the other side of the derivatives contracts, all of the Greek banks who are really in default at present and being carried by Europe as well as the nation, and the Greek default will spread the infection in many places that we cannot imagine because so much is hidden and tucked away in the European financial system.”
Welcome to Doomsday, brought to you by Mr. Grant. He says he doesn’t think of it as such; he calls it “reality.” He told me on Monday, almost hopelessly, “There’s only so much money to go around.”
In a Jan. 13, 2010, report, Mr. Grant forecast that Greece would default on its government debts, one of the first to publish such a prognostication.
Mr. Grant could be the Nouriel Roubini (Dr. Doom) of the European crisis. Mr. Roubini, the New York University economist, said the subprime-debt sky was falling for a long time before it fell. Few people listened, in part, because nobody had ever heard of him. Then, of course, the sky fell. Now everybody has heard of him. Time will tell, but soon everybody could know Mr. Grant.
The January 2010 report, written two years before Greece did indeed default, has made him the go-to forecaster of Europe’s collapse for some of the world’s largest investors. Nicknamed the Wizard, Mr. Grant, who works for Southwest Securities, sends out a daily report, often frightening in its detail and matter-of-factness, by e-mail to a who’s who of the world’s biggest institutions, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds. Subscribers like Bill Gross, a founder of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, pay thousands of dollars a year to receive Mr. Grant’s views in their in-boxes.
Never one to sugarcoat his views, his success is partly a function of his plain-spoken way of making complex ideas simple.
“There is only one way out of this mess and that is if Europe keeps handing Greece money like one does to some aged aunt that cannot support herself, but that is a family decision,” he wrote. But, he argues, “Greece requires 16 other family members to support her jointly and the politics in many of these nations, including Germany, is making it difficult for the charade to continue.”
His view of European officials’ effort to “fire-wall” the problem countries is equally simple: “This whole subject is a ruse in my opinion. Think of horses in a corral. The rancher keeps trying to build a higher and higher fence around his horses but for what purpose? For the rancher it is to keep the wolves out.”
Mr. Grant, who loves to mix metaphors, takes his rancher metaphor further: “The real problem is that the horses are sick, infected and that the disease of fiscal mismanagement has spread to virtually every horse in the corral except one and do not expect that one, Germany, to remain disease-free much longer.”
Layering on another metaphor, he adds: “You can call cancer a cold if you like but it changes nothing; not one thing.”
Sadly, Mr. Grant is not predicting the default of just Greece, he’s already on to Spain (he reached that conclusion before many others, too).
“The country cannot afford to pay off their regional debt, their bank debt,” he wrote on Monday, “and various schemes to avoid the Men in Black from taking over will not work nor will the pleas for ‘more Europe’ as the words mouthed by Germany are meant for placation only and will not find implementation in any kind of timeline that will make any difference.”
He has convinced himself that Germany, the only country in a position to help, will not come to the rescue. “You can bank on one thing if nothing else; the Germans will not allow their cost of funding to rise or their standard of living to decline to help the nations that have gotten themselves in trouble. You can count on this!” he wrote.
As we were talking on Monday, he said he wanted to make clear that he did not believe Armageddon was upon us. And it’s not as if Mr. Grant is wishing this to happen, despite his boat in Fort Lauderdale, named “Wishes Granted.”
“I don’t think the world is going to hell,” he said. “It’s very negative. What’s going on is serious. It will have a whole slew of negative consequences.” But he insisted, “I don’t think it’s going to get to the 1930s.”
More likely, he said, we are headed for a bad recession with lots “of shocks to the system.” He says this will likely happen in the next four months unless “there is debt forgiveness or Europe keeps handing them money like they are a ward of the state.”
“Or,” he warned, “it could come sooner.”
Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/one-wall-street-seer-says-the-greek-tragedy-is-near/?partner=rss&emc=rss
Greece Feels Push Toward Euro Exit
In fact, that is the sentiment a growing number of reputable economists and other commentators, particularly from fully liquid Germany, have been expressing lately.
Greece, they say, should leave the euro zone for its own good, as well as the Continent’s. Some German economists argue that other members of the 17-nation currency union, like Portugal or even Italy, might need to leave as well.
“It is better for all concerned, in particular for Greece, if the country leaves the euro temporarily,” Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the influential Ifo Institute at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, wrote in an essay published two weeks ago.
Continuing to throw money at Greece will only reduce incentives for the country to restructure its economy, he and other experts say, while pushing Europe toward a so-called transfer union where the stronger countries are required to prop up the weaker ones.
As it turns out, there is no provision in E.U. law for a member to be ejected, according to legal experts. Greece would have to withdraw voluntarily. But if the other countries cut off aid, it might have little choice.
Among European economists outside Germany, the idea that a country should be put under pressure to leave the euro zone is regarded as reckless and cruel. Greek banks would fail, the country would default on its debt and would lack a credible currency with which to buy essential imported goods like oil or even food. The whole euro area would suffer as investors feared the disintegration of the currency union and perhaps even the European Union itself.
“It’s very risky,” said Silvio Peruzzo, an economist in London for Royal Bank of Scotland. “It would set a precedent for other countries leaving the region, and the market would start to flirt with the idea that the euro as a whole doesn’t make sense.”
But in Germany, with its embedded fear of inflation and insistence that individuals should suffer the consequences of their actions, the idea that Greece should just leave is gaining wider currency, even in elite circles.
Otmar Issing, a former chief economist of the European Central Bank and one of the architects of the common currency, has implied that Greece should exit.
Asked about his position by e-mail, Mr. Issing answered indirectly, saying that countries that break the rules of monetary union — as Greece did — should have to fend for themselves.
“If a country does not comply with the conditions agreed on, it should not get further financial aid,” he said. “A country which does not get further support has to decide what to do.”
Mr. Issing and Mr. Sinn are both extremely influential, and their thinking provides an intellectual foundation for opinions widely held by ordinary Germans. Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing intense pressure within her own center-right party, some of whose members are pushing for a special party congress to discuss the debt crisis.
Meanwhile, such German attitudes get plenty of publicity in Greece and other stricken euro countries, where they feed stereotypes of arrogant, domineering Germans and stoke the resentments that are already deeply straining European unity.
Greeks, it seems, are as fed up with Germany as Germans are with Greece. As plumes of tear gas bathed the streets of Athens in June, for example, many protesters volunteered that they wanted the drachma back.
“We don’t care about staying in the euro,” said one protester, who gave his name only as Dimitris. “It would be costly, but at least with the drachma we would be able to control our own currency and our own future.”
Greeks have still not gotten over a cover of the German magazine Focus last year that depicted the Venus de Milo raising a middle finger. “Cheats in our euro family,” said the headline, a reference clearly aimed at Greece.
“People believe Greeks don’t pay our taxes and we don’t want to work,” said Christos Manolas, a Greek businessman. “That’s a myth perpetuated by the Germans.”
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8b142267ba1c293d99cde752e4b3b3cb