Central Banks Fool The Markets Again, Buy A Few Weeks Of Calm

Over the weekend, the following happened: China’s exports and imports fell by 11.2% and 18.8%, respectively, numbers which, for a trading power, are nothing short of apocalyptic. Japan’s Q4 GDP shrank at an annualized rate of 1.4% which, for a country that had spent the previous three years borrowing and printing record amounts of new currency, is an extraordinary admission of failure. And US allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia appeared to be invading Syria, putting them — and by implication the US — in direct confrontation with Russia.

This combination of disturbing trends and events would, you’d think, produce a dark and chaotic opening for Monday’s global financial markets. But you’d be wrong, because while the above was going on, Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank announced that he “will not hesitate to act” to stop the past month’s carnage. And traders responded the way they’ve been trained to, with panic buying of pretty much every dicey financial asset and panic selling of safe havens like gold, Treasury bonds and euros.

This came after previous attempts by central banks — including China’s yuan devaluation and Japan’s foray into negative interest rates — failed to get the markets’ juices flowing. So why did Draghi have the opposite effect? Three reasons:

1) He has a history of this kind of thing. Recall his 2012 “whatever it takes” promise that ignited the most recent leg of the global asset bubble. So despite the fact that he doesn’t actually do much, traders seem to find the ex-Goldman Sachs bankers words inordinately comforting.

2) One of the things Draghi seems to be offering this time around is expanded help for Italy’s imminent banking system implosion. Recall that about 18% of Italian bank loans are “non-performing,” that is, not making payments. This is almost without precedent for a whole country and extremely rare for individual banks — usually the latter die before things reach this point. So if the ECB changes the rules to, for instance, allow Italian banks to use non-performing loans as collateral for new financing, that might keep them alive for a little while longer. Though at the cost of vastly increased taxpayer liabilities.