Will Turkey’s Unfolding Currency Crisis Signify as the Periphery to the Core Transmission?

Turkey’s lira crashed by 13.7% last Friday, plunged by 21% over the week and 41.1% in 2018. As a sign of the deterioration of the US-Turkey relationship, US President Donald Trump’s recently imposed sanctions on the Erdogan government. The crashing lira represents the “first currency crisis of the floating era”, according to a popular economist.

Say what? A currency crisis in the era of floating exchange rate regimes?! Have floating exchanges not been the Holy Grail?

How about foreign reserves? Have they not been designed to function as a shield against a currency crisis?

 

To stanch the lira’s hemorrhage, Turkey’s central bank has raised policy rates by a stunning 975 basis points in May and in June. Unfortunately, such aggressive rate hikes haven’t calmed the crashing lira.

 

That’s because Turkey’s money supply growth has exploded. A surge in debt levels fueled money supply's double-digit growth for years. Short-term external debt has grown faster than foreign reserves.

Turkey had been previously acclaimed for its infrastructure based ‘economic miracle’: an economic miracle that had been propped up by money supply growth through massive debt expansions.

Today it suffers from a currency crisis. It may be Turkey’s time to pay the piper.

Turkey’s predicament has not been in isolation.

 

Currency pressures have emerged and have been intensifying in emerging market currencies: Argentina’s dollar, Iran rial, the Russian ruble, the South African rand, Brazil real et.al as shown by the weekly chart above.  The Chinese yuan also fell.

Will Turkey’s currency crisis morph into a banking or debt crisis? Will it spread to the emerging market sphere?  

 

How will this impact Turkey’s major creditors, mostly European banks with some exposure by US and Japan banks? How will such dynamic impact external trade with Turkey?

Will Turkey’s currency crisis highlight the periphery to the core transmission?

Emerging Market Turmoil: The Fallacy of Foreign Currency Reserves as Talisman

One fascinating populist meme about how specific emerging markets may survive the recent tantrums has been to cite foreign exchange reserves as talisman or amulet to a crisis. 

As reminder any balance of payment disorders are symptoms and not the source of crisis. The common denominator of every crisis is DEBT.

Central Bank Dilemma: To Use Foreign Currency Reserves or Not?

There have been two contrasting approaches adapted by EM central bankers to the current EM tantrums.

Instead of using forex reserves, Turkey’s government has opted to use the interest rate channel to deal with the current disturbance.

Turkey with a record of forex reserves at $ 149.7 billion, almost 2x the Philippines at $ 84 billion, surprised her financial market by massively raising key interest rates across the board to combat the sinking lira. The one week repo rate was increased by a stunning 550 basis points or from 4.5% to 10%! Read my lips FIVE HUNDRED FIFTY basis points. The lira had a one day celebration. Unfortunately the FED reduced monetary accommodation anew that wiped out the one day gains and even led the lira to set new record lows! The market seems to be saying that the current interest rate levels despite the increases have not been sufficient to compensate for the risks. This means more interest rates hikes or the Turkish government will have to begin using her record forex reserves.

Turkey is in dire straits as I discuss here[1]. Not only have the financial system been burdened by huge pile up of debt, they have about $ 160 billion of short term debt due this year. So a sustained lira depreciation and rising rates in Turkey’s creditor nations will mean a double black eye for deeply indebted transcontinental country.

Worst, foreign banks have $ 350 billion of credit exposure on Turkey’s financial system. How much of Turkey’s economy can absorb such tremendous spike in interest rate or a crashing lira before the economy tailspins? Should there be a credit event in Turkey how much of these $350 billion in debt held by foreign banks will be defaulted upon? What will be the repercussions? Are sinking stocks in Europe and the US signs of these? You think that Turkey’s conditions are merely signs of a “hiccup”?

The second approach has been to use forex reserves to fight off a crashing currency. This has been the case with Argentina whose currency has been collapsing whether seen from official rates or black market rates (left window).

The Argentinean government has been draining her forex reserves which have been down by a third now to US $29 billion[2]. This has forced the government to devalue to 8 pesos from 6 pesos last week, even when the black market has long been devaluing. Argentina’s government also raised interest rates by six percentage points[3].

The reason for the draining of reserves? Because the socialist government which nationalized many major industries have come short of securing financing. The Argentine government has massively increased spending by running down the reserves (right window). Argentina remains highly indebted and has still unresolved debt restructuring issues which has been a legacy from her default in 2002[4].

Argentina’s economic data can’t be relied on as the government has threatened domestic economic industry of jail time if they published data which goes against the declaration of the government[5]. What has been evident is that the government’s spending spree and the shrinking access to the pool of global credit markets have been instrumental in inciting a currency crash.

You think Argentina’s dilemma poses as a knee jerk reaction?

Foreign Currency Reserves are Manifestations of Bubbles

I find it ludicrous for the mainstream to keep yelling “forex reserves!”, “forex reserves!”, “forex reserves!” as if forex reserves function as some quaint magical amulet against evil spirits.

But this is reality. The source of problems has not been due to a war with some bad spirits but rather excessive debts looking for a release valve in the face of rising interest rates.

Think of it, the world has $11.434 trillion of foreign currency reserves mostly in US dollars as of the 3^rd quarter of 2013, according to the COFER data from the IMF.

If “forex reserves!” equals the magical talisman then we would NOT be experiencing any of these volatilities at all. But this market revulsion has been HAPPENING. It’s been happening IN SPITE of the RECORD international reserve assets. And it has been happening REAL TIME!

The problem is that foreign currency reserves serve as real time manifestations of accrued imbalances rather than the cure to the problem. I can discuss that this as related to the Triffin Dilemma as I did before[6], but this will unduly extend this already prolonged discussion.

The bottom line is that the US dollar standard which financed the world with the FED’s printing machine has fuelled a business cycle in an international scale.

Americans built their comparative advantage via engineering of mostly tradeable debt instruments that has led to a massive growth in her financial industry known as financialization. 

The financial industry with less than 10% weighting in the S&P 500 in 1990 became the biggest industry in 2007 as she exported subprime mortgage papers around the world[7].

Meanwhile the world assembled a global network supply chain to supply the US with goods which ultimately transformed into globalization. And US Financialization helped fulfil demand by the world, who accumulated US dollars via trade expressed in record forex reserves, to recycle savings into US dollar assets. Of course the developed world also learned mimic their version of financialization. 

At the end of the day, the US dollar standard has brought about record debt levels not only for mature market economies (right window) but for the entire world—estimated by the ING in 2012 at $223.3 trillion or 313%(!) of the GDP[8]. EM debt has been estimated at $66.3 trillion or 224% (!) of GDP in 2012.

Accompanying record debt has been record financial assets[9] that have been galloping far away from global economic growth (left window).

Even more, the world’s ramping up of US dollar reserves by the printing local currency by domestic central banks has fuelled bubbles on a national scale.

Why forex reserves are manifestations of imbalances? Austrian economist Antony Mueller explains[10]. (bold mine)

The expansion of debt by the issuer of the international reserve medium augments the stock of international reserves and the increase of the reserves works like a growth of the global money supply. Central bank balance sheets show that the circulating domestic money forms a debit item, while foreign reserves are part of the credit side. All other things being equal, an increase in foreign reserves implies money creation. This way, foreign debt accumulation by the issuer of a global reserve currency impacts monetary demand through two channels: in the debtor country by the domestic spending of foreign savings, and in the creditor country by the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves which augment the money supply

Where the release valves from the stockpile of foreign reserves are to be expected? Again Professor Mueller (bold mine)

The country, which emits the international reserve currency, does not face a foreign exchange constraint; thus there will be no immediate limit for this process to go to its extremes. Additionally, an expansion of this kind must not be accompanied by price inflation right away. The prices for tradable goods may stay low for a considerable period of time and instead of a price inflation the bubble emerges in the asset markets. After all it is the transaction in the capital account of the balance of payments -- the buying and selling of debt instruments -- which lies at the heart of the process and it is here where the music plays in terms of the bubble. Bubbles, however, have the nasty habit of imploding because they are build on some unsustainable element. This factor within an international debt cycle concerns debt service payments, and this has consequences for international trade and economic growth

Has it not been that the outflows from EM local currency debt instruments and from domestic currency a reflection of troubles in the capital account of the balance of payments?

Eventually bubble enthusiasts will come to realize, that screaming “forex reserves!” “forex reserves!” “forex reserves!” will not serve as free passes to bubbles.

Russian Ruble: A Domestic Outflow

As a final thought, I recently pointed at the unique case of the ongoing pressure on Russia’s currency, the ruble. Russia would have been seen by the mainstream as having a strong external finance conditions, since she has $510 billion of forex reserves (6x the Philippine reserves), has significant surpluses in both trade balance and current account balance (though the latter has been dwindling).

Yet Russia suffers from both property bubble fuelled by credit inflation and runaway local government debt. Lately one of the 200 largest bank in terms of assets the ‘My Bank’ suspended withdrawals for a week. Why would My Bank suspend withdrawals unless she has been financing some problem? Perhaps signs of a bank run?

And guess who’s been selling the ruble?

Well strange as it seems, it has not been foreign outflows as mainstream paints them to be. Russia continues to post foreign capital inflows from 2012 to 2013 (left window). It has been residents whom have been scampering off Russia at a pace that has been picking up pace (right window). There may be various reasons for this such as safehaven, alternative investments or even possibly signs of recognition of a bursting bubble as discussed here[11].

The point worth repeating is that every conditions are unique and that there are no “line in the sand” or specific thresholds before a revulsion on domestic credit occurs.

This brings us to the periphery to core dynamic. For every crisis the first manifestations will be via steepening and spreading of dislocations in the financial markets. Then this transitions into a liquidity squeeze. And finally liquidity squeezes will hit on the real economy possibly either through a credit event first before an economic recession or vice versa.

For those afflicted by the Aldous Huxley syndrome, keep in mind that in the 2007-8 global crisis, the Phisix fell by more than 50% even when the Philippines had floating exchange rate, record forex exchange reserves and low NPLs. The Philippines even narrowly escaped a statistical recession.

Of course one may argue that today’s problem has been different than in 2008. One might assert that today has been an emerging market problem. Part correct. But there are always two sides to a coin. Applied to current events, while one side of the coin is the emerging markets, the other side is the US-developed economies.

But don’t forget: Both of the two sides share the same coin: the DEBT problem coin. Example, just look at how entwined Turkey’s problem has been with foreign banks. The magic number:  $350 billion.

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[1] See Turkey’s Central Banks Surprises With Huge Interest Rate Increases January 29, 2014

[2] Bloomberg.com The Price of Argentina's Devaluation January 30, 2014

[3] Bloomberg.com Argentine Bonds Plunge Most in Emerging Markets on Outflows February 1, 2014

[4] Wikipedia.org Argentine debt restructuring

[5] See Argentina Government Threatens Jail Terms for People who Question Inflation Data September 15, 2013

[6] See Will the Triffin Dilemma Haunt the Global Financial Markets? August 12, 2013

[7] Wikipedia.org Subprime mortgage crisis

[8] Wall Street Real Time Economics Blog Number of the Week: Total World Debt Load at 313% of GDP May 11, 2013

[9] Institute of International Finance Economic Recovery and Dependence on Asset Values January 8, 2014

[10] Antony P. Mueller Do Current Account Deficits Matter? Mises.org Journals

[11] See Behind Russia’s Central Bank’s “Unlimited Intervention” January 31, 2013

Turkey’s Central Banks Surprises With Huge Interest Rate Increases

Turkey’s central bank just made a stunning “shock and awe” move in order to calm her mercurial financial, particularly the currency market. The central bank substantially raised interest rates by 400-500 basis points

From Bloomberg:

Turkey’s central bank raised all its main interest rates at an emergency meeting, resisting political pressure and reversing years of policy, after the lira slid to a record low.

The bank in Ankara raised the benchmark one-week repo rate to 10 percent from 4.5 percent, according to a statement posted on its website at midnight. It also raised the overnight lending rate to 12 percent from 7.75 percent, and the overnight borrowing rate to 8 percent from 3.5 percent. The lira extended gains after the announcement, adding 3 percent to 2.18 per dollar at 1 a.m. in Istanbul.

Turkey is one of the supposed member of the emerging market Morgan Stanley coined “fragile 5”—along with Brazil, South Africa, India and Indonesia.

Some have cheered that Turkey’s central bank’s surprising move may have contained the emerging market contagion, but such optimists may be overlooking the possible impact of these rate increases on the real economy.

The central bank’s action has been meant to stabilize the Turkish lira which has been in a collapse mode vis-à-vis the US dollar.

This is the historical performance of Turkey’s interest rates. Like everywhere else, Turkey rates has been zero bound since 2008. Yet the recent rate hike is still far from the highs of the 2008 crisis

What has been the outcome of the zero bound rates?

Again like everywhere else, the short answer is a Credit Bubble.

Loans to the private sector spiraled to the firmament. Turkey’s credit backed spending spree has led to massive deficits in her trade and current account balances. This means that her lavish debt financed spending depended also on foreign money to plug these holes. This is another symptom of the Credit Bubble.

Moreover Turkey government continues to spend more than she collects thus sustaining a budget deficit.

And this gap has been financed by external borrowing which has leapt since 2010. External debt has grown by about 40% from the 2010 lows.

So zero bound rates promoted debt financed spending of the private sector and of the government which had been funded by banks and by foreign money. 

This is very interesting because there are about $160+ billion short term external debt due this year according to Turkey’s Central Bank, mostly held by private banks and by the other sectors.

And the other concern is of the external financing requirements excluding short term debt.

Another point of concern is of the $350 billion worth of foreign banking exposure on Turkey. Should there be any default/s will these foreign banks not be affected?

Interesting no?

Some questions

Will the current shock and awe be enough to stabilize Turkey’s financial system? Or will this just have a short term effect, where the current hike could be the first of the series of many more rate hikes to come?

How will the current dramatic rate hike impact the real economy (private sector and the government)? Importantly how will the current interest policy affect Turkey’s government and the private sector’s capacity to service debt? 

The markets have already been pricing in higher probability of Turkey’s debt default via higher CDS spreads

Mind you, for all those singing hosannas that forex reserves serve as talisman from a crisis, so far Turkey’s massive record foreign exchange reserves has done little to contain the financial upheaval.

It’s very interesting because Turkey could function as a paradigm to a possible crisis contagion or ‘domino effect’ in emerging markets.

It's even more interesting for Emerging Markets and for Asia to pray that the US Federal Reserve, whom are meeting today, won't add to their woes by increasing the "taper" 

Charts: Stock Market Boom Bust Cycles and Interest Rates

I’ve been saying that stock market boom bust cycles have principally been driven by manipulations of interest rates or as consequence to interest rate policies by central banks.

Here are some charts to exhibit their correlations

Going into the close of 2012, this year’s crown holder as the best stock market performer has been Turkey whose main benchmark has been up by nearly 50% (as of last Friday’s close).

[Note: I excluded Venezuela's case since her stock market's nearly 300% gains appear as part of the symptoms of a brewing hyperinflation]

Like the Philippines, Turkey’s central bank has aggressively been pruning interest rates. Most of which has been implemented during the third quarter of the year which has coincided with the last quarter spike for Turkey’s stock market.

Asia’s uncontested star: Pakistan has been up by almost 50% (as of last Friday’s close) and has been in a spitting distance with Turkey.

Pakistan has also been in an interest rate cutting spree since 2011. This year, particularly during the last half, Pakistan’s central bank serially trimmed interest rates to a 5-year low.

Mexico hasn’t been in the roster of this year’s best (up by about 17% as of Friday), but since her bellwether trades at record highs I included this.

All three shares some common characteristics

1. Bold reduction of interest rates have spurred stock market booms

2. When interest rates have been marginally raised, stock markets consolidated

3. When interest rates have been significantly raised, stock markets decline meaningfully (as depicted in 2008).

One of Asia’s laggards Bangladesh’s Dhaka down by 20% this year, shows of the other half of story above…

Since Bangladesh began tightening in January of 2011, which I featured here, her stock market has lost nearly half from peak to-trough

Note: All charts above from tradingeconomics.com

Inflationary booms create the misimpression or the illusion of prosperity (which are adapted by governments for political reasons), but in reality they are unsustainable for the simple reason that they signify as unsound economic policies.

As the great economist and professor Ludwig von Mises admonished,

But increases in the quantity of money and fiduciary media will not enrich the world or build up what destructionism has torn down. Expansion of credit does lead to a boom at first, it is true, but sooner or later this boom is bound to crash and bring about a new depression. Only apparent and temporary relief can be won by tricks of banking and currency. In the long run they must land the nation in profounder catastrophe. For the damage such methods inflict on national well-being is all the heavier, the longer people have managed to deceive themselves with the illusion of prosperity which the continuous creation of credit has conjured up

And another thing…

China’s Shanghai index has rallied markedly yesterday to erase her year to date losses.

Going into China’s stock market boom bust cycle-interest rate policies, we see the same story playout

Turkish Banks offer Gold Deposit Accounts

Speaking of a reset in the global order monetary, one possible step towards the reintroduction of gold as money is for the banking system not only to accept gold as loan collateral but for people to be able to have gold deposit accounts which could pave way for payments and settlements services in gold.

Banks in Turkey seems to have lunged into this path.

From Mineweb.com

For centuries, Turks have flocked to the jewellery shops of Istanbul's labyrinthine Grand Bazaar to trade their gold - ornaments handed down through their families over generations, or bars stashed under mattresses as savings. But in recent months the shops have a new and unexpected competitor: banks.

The country's commercial banks are pouring their technical expertise and marketing resources into offering their customers gold deposit accounts. Customers hand their gold to a bank and can make withdrawals from their accounts in gold bars or the lira currency; the accounts offer interest rates that are substantially lower than those on normal time deposits.

Gold deposit accounts have been growing around the world, but Turkey's boom has made it a leader in the trend. This appears to have cut the amount of gold flowing to jewellers in the Grand Bazaar and elsewhere in the country, a trend which dismays the shop owners. In the long run, it could threaten their business model, which relies partly on turning scrap gold they buy into jewellery and selling it back to retail customers…

Gold is big business in Turkey, for cultural reasons and also because of the country's experience with bouts of high inflation over the past century. The metal is traditionally given as a gift at weddings and circumcision ceremonies, and demand for imports tends to surge during the summer months.

Turks are believed to have accumulated about 5,000 tonnes of gold in their homes, worth around $250 billion at current international prices, according to the World Gold Council, an industry lobby. It ranks Turkey's gold demand as fifth in the world for jewellery and eighth for retail investment, mostly behind countries with much bigger populations such as India, China and the United States.

I hope that Philippine banking system does the same.

Gold is Money: Turkey Edition

While Ben Bernanke and his ivory tower based cohorts do not treat gold as money, for the average Turks, gold is money.

From the Wall Street Journal,

The Turkish government, facing a bloated current-account deficit that threatens to derail the country's rapid expansion, is trying to persuade Turks to transfer their vast personal holdings of gold into the country's banking system.

The push to tap into the individual gold reserves—the traditional form of savings here—is part of Ankara's efforts to reduce a finance gap that is currently about 10% of gross domestic product.

Government officials say the banking regulator will soon publish a plan to boost incentives for consumers to park their household wealth inside the financial system. Banking executives said they are considering new interest-yielding gold-deposit accounts that would allow savers to withdraw gold bars from specially designed automated teller machines.

The moves come after the central bank in November announced that lenders could hold up to 10% of their local-currency reserves in gold, in part to tempt Turkey's gold hoarders to deposit their jewelry, coins or bullion at banks.

Economists say the policy shift is designed to change Turks' historic preference for storing a high percentage of personal wealth outside the banking system as a way to protect themselves against the economic volatility that has periodically hit Turkey in recent decades.

The effort is one front in a broader battle to encourage more savings while curbing the ballooning current-account deficit—a pressure point many investors fear could upend a fast-growing economy, estimated to have expanded more than 8% last year. Turkey's current-account gap has expanded faster than expected in recent weeks amid a surge in oil prices and data showing unexpectedly high consumer demand.

"Turkey has historically been hit by crises and inflation, so the tradition of holding gold outside the system could be hard to shift," said Murat Ucer, an economist at Global Source Partners, an Istanbul-based research consultancy.

The size of the gold haul stored outside Turkey's banking system is hard to quantify; no data reliably capture the scale of the informal economy. The Istanbul Gold Refinery estimates the figure at 5,000 metric tons, valued at $270 billion. Recent numbers show many consumers have boosted home-held deposits even as the country's tightly regulated banking system won plaudits for comfortably weathering the financial crisis.

Unlike India, whom recently announced plans to raise import duties on gold imports, Turkey’s government either has not yet reached a point of desperation to impose political controls over gold trades, or that they have come to realize of the futility of imposing antagonistic and oppressive policies. Instead, the Turkish government has, so far, resorted to wooing or appealing to the public to help the government.

However, I am inclined to the view that this as an initial or temporary step before any imposition of political controls. With institutional violence under their control (police or military power), the temptation to use force through tax or administrative policies will always be there.

It is also very important to note of how gold has served as insurance against political control via the banking system. It would appear that the average Turks, basically don’t trust the banking system, and thus keeps their savings in gold and stashed away from the prying eyes of political authorities. The average Turks, I presume, perhaps (culturally) understands that through the banking system, their savings or wealth could be faced with greater risks of confiscation through various political means as taxation.

Nevertheless this is a good remainder of the distinction between the world as seen by politicians and bureaucrats and of reality (which reflects on people’s sense of values.)

This quote, which I earlier blogged, attributed to Mr. Janos Feteke (who I think was the deputy governor of the National Bank of Hungary) seems very relevant

There are about three hundred economists in the world who are against gold, and they think that gold is a barbarous relic - and they might be right. Unfortunately, there are three billion inhabitants of the world who believe in gold

This is essentially why political actions that go against public’s desires eventually self-destructs.