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Perhaps the clearest indicator we have so far of the shape of things to come is offered by the August services PMI reading, which shows the sector went back into contraction in August, a performance that for a country which depends to some significant extent on tourism is really pretty striking.

As Andrew Harker, economist at Markit and author of the monthly report commented:

“Months of broadly stagnant demand have now resulted in a decline in activity in the Spanish service sector, albeit a marginal one. It looks increasingly likely that the anaemic GDP growth seen during the second quarter of the year marks the high point of the recovery for the time being. The recent rise in VAT has further added to problems for service providers as weak demand has largely forced firms to absorbcost increases.”

The manufacturing sector continues to turn in a very slight positive reading, but both new orders and employment are falling.

Car sales were down 25% in August over August 2009, due in part to the withdrawal of the “cash for clunckers” programme, and in part to the rise in VAT, and finally industrial production data showed that output even fell very slightly in June.

Unsurprisingly, retail sales fell back sharply in July (by 3% month on month) following pre VAT rise purchases in June.

And unemployment, which is now heading up over and beyond the 20% mark (20.3% in July) was up again in August (even by 12,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis.

We don’t have the July construction data yet, but the position with retail sales is likely to be repeated, following a strong 7% (month on month) pre VAT surge in June.

Exports did recover to some extent during the “good times”, but to nothing like the extent they did in the more strongly competitive exporting countries.

And in fact, as we saw in a previous post, the net effect of the stimulus was to temporarily widen the trade deficit (strange, Monsieur Trichet on being asked by a journalist at the last ECB press conference when he planned to withdraw his stimulus, was most adamant that the ECB non-standard measures did not constitute “stimulus” – I guess it’s lucky for US citizens that Ben Bernanke doesn’t see things that way). Now, whether from the ECB or the Spanish government, the outlook is for gradual withdrawal of stimulus, which means the only realistic outlook for a badly structurally distorted Spanish economy is towards a slow but steady decline.

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So what is going on here, does the earth switch it’s magnetic pole every six months, with what went up last time round now going down? Or could it possibly be some kind of common thread here, one common factor which unites the unprecedented expansion we have just seen in Germany, and the fears of renewed recession in the United States. Well, as it happens, indeed there could, and it has a name – the Greek debt crisis.

Structural Problems In The Currency Architecture?

So what is the link? Well, the fact of the matter is that we live in a bi-polar world, at least as far as currencies are concerned. Until our current global financial architecture evolves into something more sophistocated, we have two main currencies which rival one another for pride of place in central bank reserves and investment portfolios: the euro and the dollar, and when one of these goes up, the other must come down, and vice versa. It is as simple, and as complicated, as that.

Prior to February, and the outbreak of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis the US economy was seen as the weaker partner, and the euro was priced at a relatively high level. Then the euro slumped (falling at one point from around 135 to 120 to the US dollar in a matter of weeks) as attention focused on what appeared to be significant weaknesses in the Eurozone infrastructure. As a result of the change German exports boomed, while the US economic recovery steadily started to grind to a halt.

And with the rise of the dollar the global economy started to fall back into dangerous – pre crisis – habits. The US trade deficit started to open up again, and one exporting nation after another started to see yet one more time the US market as the global economy’s consumer of last resort. Indeed the US June trade statistics reveal the extent to which American consumers are once more sucking in large quantities of imports as their spending power recovers, while weak demand in the rest of the world coupled with the comparatively high dollar has been keeping a brake on American exports.

As the New York Times put it in an editorial, “China is mopping up demand everywhere you look with its artificially cheap supply of goods, while Germany, the world’s other exporting power, is cutting its budget and relying on foreign demand to drive its economic rebound. This isn’t sustainable”.

And the numbers prove the point. The United States trade deficit ballooned to $49.9 billion in June, the biggest since October 2008. In July, one month later, China recorded a $28.7 billion trade surplus, the biggest since January 2009. In the first five months of the year, Germany’s trade surplus, driven in large part by demand for machine tools in recovering Asian economies (many of them busily sending exports to the US), rose 30 percent compared with 2009.

And this impression is only confirmed when we come to look at the latest revision for US GDP in the second quarter. According to the revised data, US GDP increased at an annualised 1.6% rate (as compared with the 9% annual rate in Germany), after registering a 3.7% rate in the first quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) today. The second-quarter growth rate was revised down by 0.8 percentage point from the “advance” estimate (of 2.4%), in part as a result of the new data on imports for June. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis report stated that slower GDP growth primarily reflected a surge in imports compared with the previous quarter and a slowdown in inventory investment. In fact, real exports of goods and services increased at a 9.1% rate in the second quarter, compared with an increase of 11.4% in the first, while real imports of goods and services increased by 32.4%, compared with an increase of 11.2% in Q1.

Effectively the American economy is simply too weak to carry this additional load, and is now showing signs of heading back towards recession, forcing the Federal reserve, which only a few months ago was moving towards a tightening in monetary policy to fend off inflation to now re-assert its policy of quantitative easing to avoid any posssibility of a drift towards deflation.

Meanwhile the German economy turns in a 2.2 per cent quarterly growth spurt, unified Germany’s best-ever performance. The annualised 9 per cent growth rate, is, as the Financial Times noted, virtually unprecedented in developed economy terms. Such dramatic changes, rather than reassuring us that all is well, only lead to even more doubts. Is it really desireable for an economy to shoot forward so dramatically, only to fall back again in the second half, which is what almost everyone (Monsieur Trichet included) expects to happen?

Not only does the German performance seem exaggeratedly large, at the other end, on Europe’s periphery, the result was lamentably small. Greece naturally exceeded everyone’s expectations, on the downside, with a 1.5 per cent quarterly contraction (a 6 per cent annual rate), but Spain remained at the bottom end of the range, with a 0.2 per cent expansion, as did Portugal. Undoubtedly the Greek contraction will slow as the year advances, but the outlook there continues to be preoccupying. Only today the Greek manufacturing PMI, which showed the contraction in Greece’s industrial sector accelerated again in August, has reminded us of just how difficult it is going to be for the country to return to growth, and especially if the external environment now starts to deteriorate.

As the FT’s David Oakley said yesterday, in many ways Germany could be said to have had a “good crisis”, since the Greek issue pushed the Euro down and German exports up, while the current flight to safety is driving down the yield on German bunds to record lows even as it pushes up the spreads for peripheral Europe sovereigns. Among other imapcts this gives German companies an even greater competitive advantage as their capital costs come down even while those for their competitors go up.

Spreads – which are the additional borrowing premiums countries have to pay over benchmark Bunds – hit a fresh record of 357 basis points in Ireland this week, following problems in Allied Irish bank and a Standard & Poor’s downgrade. In Portugal and Spain, spreads have been creeping back up, and are now once more close to their all-time highs. Spain’s 10-year bonds are trading at about 192 basis points above Germany, compared with 57 at the start of the year while Portugal is trading at 333 basis points, compared with 67 on January 1. The following chart shows how peripheral spreads have evolved since the start of the year (they have been indexed to 1st January). As is evident they shot up in May, then came down to lower levels in July, but during August they have once more been climbing.

All three economies are experiencing extremely weak growth and Ireland is even flirting with deflation. Higher government borrowing costs can harm economies in a number of ways, from higher borrowing costs for companies to added pressure on a country’s public finances as more is eaten up in interest charges, leaving less for public services and stimulus. Effectively the presence of a large spread differential means that monetary policy is applied unevenly across the Euro Area, despite the “one size for all” objective of the ECB. And doubly so with a credit crunch which means some banks struggle to finance as a backdrop.

Japan Trapped On The Ropes

And as if all of this wasn’t enough, Germany’s main competitor in Asia (where German exports have been clocking up large increases) has been effectively KO’d by the flight to safety produced by the Sovereign Debt Crisis. Japan’s exchange rate against the USD dollar is now hovering around a 15 year high.

The consequence of this is not hard to predict, while Germany clocks up record exports to China and other parts of the continent, the Japanese “recovery” is gradually grinding to a halt, as the latest manufacturing PMI report only confirms.

We Need To Seriously Address The Imbalances

At the end of the day it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we continue to live in a very unbalanced and essentially economically unstable world, where currency valuations and economic growth rates fluctuate with unnerving rapidity. Not only that, the recent Federal Reserve meeting seems to have constituted some sort of defining moment, the point when everyone finally recognises that the long promised recovery was no longer simply weeks or months away, and that emerging from the trough in which the developed economies find themselves is going to involve a long period of slow and painful effort, one where we will also need time to clean up the mess we have made in cleaning up the original mess, assuming that is that we have the dynamism and energy to do so.

On thing is clear, the old habits won’t work any better now than they did before 2007, and external deficits which were not sustainable then will not be sustainable now. So we need a new model, a model in which the emerging markets will have a much larger role to play than ever before. And if we are to move towards a more sustainable future, then we need to move beyond those simplistic headlines stressing the virile nature of Germany’s export prowess. There is no doubting the efficacy and competitiveness of many German companies, but for that very reason that country needs to shoulder more of the responsibility for sharing the burden which is involved in finding solutions. Here in Europe we don’t only need sacrifices in the South, some of them also need to be made in the north. German industry is enjoying real and tangible benefits (via artificially low interest rates and an undervalued currency) from the mess that the Greeks created for themselves, but in the interest of all European some of those benefits need to be plowed back in again, since if Greece is allowed to fail, no one will be the winner.

Looking beyond Europe we need to think about how to best aid and abet the emerging economies in their quest for growth and better living standards. Earlier in the crisis I asked Nobel Economist Paul Krugman a question which is very much to the point. “At a time when the financial crisis is generalised across all developed economies – whether because those who borrowed the money now have difficulty paying back, or those who leant it now struggle to recover the money owed them – to which new planet are we all going to export?”

My response to him back in January was that maybe we don’t need to look so far afield. Many developing economies badly need cheap and responsible credit lines, and access to state-of-the-art technologies, so why not accept the world is changing, and go for some sort of New Marshall Plan, one capable of generating a win-win dynamic which would be in all our interests? At the time the proposal seemed totally unrealistic and unobtainable. Now, with every day which passes it starts to look essential. And who knows, maybe the rise of a number of other major economic powers would help solve that bipolar currency problem which is currently causing our policymakers so many headaches.

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Consumer Boom

The first myth I would like to debunk is that it simply is not true that the Germans are a group of “non consumers”, and inveterate savers. Back in the 1990s German private consumption enjoyed a huge boom, a boom which ground itself to a halt around the year 2000. It is only since 2000 that German private consumption growth has been lacklustre, and incapable of driving the economy. (I am using a Bloomberg chart here, since I don’t have a long enough time series to hand to make my own version).

Now if we look at the same chart for Spain, we can see that private consumption growth enjoyed the same kind of “blossoming” that German consumption did between roughly 1999 and 2007.

Driven By Borrowing

But more than the phenomenon of the consumption boom in and of itself, what is interesting is what was driving it. Unsurprisingly we find the “usual suspect” – rapid increases in credit. Again, the following charts belie the idea that Germans have always been a nation of meticulous savers.

And again, the Spanish charts for mortgage increases tell a very similar (if even more exaggerated) story.

And it wasn’t only households, corporates were busy at it too. Interestingly, corporate borrowing seems to have had a brief renaissance in Germany on the back of the current crisis.

Yet again, the only area in which Spain distinguishes itself is in the magnitude of the phenomenon. Spanish corporate indebtedness is a much, much more serious problem than German corporate indebtedness ever was.

When we come to look at the last set of loan charts, I would point of two features. In the first place, total private sector debt is not that different between the two countries, despite the fact that German GDP is around twice as large as Spanish GDP.

And in the second place, look at the long tail on German year-on-year borrowing, this is the point where those with eyes to see should be able to discern something of the future which awaits Spain. Interannual lending in Spain isn’t going to climb back up again, and we should expect it to trawl around the zero percent level for many years to come, as Spain’s private sector deleverages itself.

From Current Account Deficits To Current Account Surpluses

Which brings us to the next point, the association between lending booms and current account surpluses. As we can see in the chart below, Germany was no exception to the rule here, and all through the duration of the consumption boom the country ran small current account deficits. Deficits which then became surpluses after the huge structural adjustment the country went through in the transition from being a consumer driven to being an export driven economy.

And this is the path that Spain will now surely have to follow, but just note the massive difference in scale between the two. Spain’s adjustment will need to be enormous. And how could this have happened we might like to ask ourselves? Were all the relevant drivers fast asleep, lurched over their wheels? How come no one “saw this coming”?

Given the magnitude of the correction, it is not really surprising that the IMF seem to want to hope against hope that it really won’t be necessary. As the chart below illustrates, they seem to be hoping markets will sustain the current account deficits all the way through till 2015. As can be seen, Spain is the worst case offender, and the country where the structural transformation will need to be largest. So why do the IMF continue to believe in something which is scarcely credible? It could be that they simply accept the Spanish government’s own optimistic idea that private consumption will come back to the 2% growth level again, kick started by a surge in borrowing. But a study of what happened in Germany makes that highly unlikely. Spain’s banks are having trouble enough financing themselves as things stand, are people seriously suggesting the markets will now fund another bout of additional leveraging?

And if the private sector isn’t going to do the borrowing, then who is? Since simple book-keeping tells us that having a CA deficit on the one hand implies capital flows on the other to fund it. The only conclusion I can come to – and this is what I argue in this post - is that we are assuming the government is going to continue to run a sizeable deficit, or that there will be straight fiscal transfers from other parts of the Euro Area to Spain. Otherwise the numbers simply don’t add up.

Worm Into Butterfly?

What I have been arguing so far should be relatively uncontroversial for anyone with a sound grasp of applied macro. What comes next is more of a hypothesis. As we have seen, economies seem to transit from being consumption driven to export driven, so we might like to ask ourselves, is the process merely random, or are their underlying structural dynamics at work. As I am trying to argue in the German case, the shift doesn’t seem to be a cultural one, and if Spain follows Germany down the same road then we will certainly know it isn’t.

So what could be driving all this. Well, as Claus Vistesen and I have speculated, ageing populations and the demographic transition may well have something to tell us here. Using Modigliani’s life cycle saving and borrowing idea, and the Swedish demographer Bo Malmberg’s idea of population “ages” (child, young adult, middle aged and elderly), Claus has prepared the following chart in an attempt to illustrate the process.

Of course, all of this at the moment remains at the levl of hypothesis. I tend to use median population ages as a rough and ready measure of ageing, and (even though I wouldn’t want to claim any precision here) it is interesting to note that both Germany and Spain have started to transit off towards export dependence at around the 40 median age point.

Still, this is early days yet, and we will know a lot more in this regard when we see how the different countries all along Europe’s periphery perfom in the years to come. Will they, as the IMF and the EU Commission seem to assume, go back to being consumption driven, or will they be condemned to follow the German path? Certainly Hungary, to take just one example, seems to look more and more as if its economy which desparately trying – but so far unable – to transform itself into yet another Germany.

Real Devaluation

The worrying thing looking at the above inter-country comparison is how much larger Spain’s correction is going to need to be than Germany’s was. As Wolfgang Munchau pointed out in the FT yesterday, Germany entered the eurozone at an uncompetitive exchange rate and embarked on a long period of (quite painful) wage moderation and deep structural reform. In fact, Germany entered the Euro with an excahnge rate which was too high, give the new role exports were going to play in economic growth. The German adjustment can be clearly seen in the REER chart below, as can the very large adjustment that Spain will have to make in comparison with the German one.

When macro economists say this will be “painful” they don’t do so to be sadists, they say this since they know this is going to be hard, very hard. And doubly so when almost all those responsible for taking policy decisions at all the respective levels seem to deny that it is going to be necessary. I have advanced two suggestings (a systematic reduction of 20% in wages and prices in Spain, or a temporary exit of Germany from the Euro Zone). Since neither of these have gained any traction at all, it is reasonale to assume they are now not going to happen (at least in any orderly way). But the car is still heading full speed towards that brick wall. When it finally does crash, will the Queen of England once more say to Luis Garicano, “but tell me Luis, just why was it no one saw this coming?”.

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Of course, the retail PMIs are not an exact science, and they only give us an indication of the retail environment. But their long term trend is not in disharmony with the actual sales data provided later by the statistics office, since sales in Germany have been generally trending down, and as the writers of the report say, the long-run series average (49.1) does show slight ongoing contraction .

Consumer confidence, on the other hand, has risen slightly in recent months, but it is still well below the pre-crisis level:

While the ZEW investor sentiment index – normally a forward looking indicator – has been dropping steadily for some months now.

So if we combine this with the August flash German PMI reading (which dropped back slightly over earlier months), it would seem that some easing off of German GDP is taking place, and indeed few will be surprised by this, since the very rapid rate of Q2 growth was clearly a one off. The issue really is that these very rapid (Leo Messi in-the-box type) accelerations don’t seem to pass through to self-sustaining (via the consumption pillar) expansions, and I do wish more people would start to ask themselves why this is.

Moving on to other parts of the Euro Area, French retail sales seem to have continued to grow in August, although at a rather weaker pace than in July.

But whichever way you look at it French retails sales have a decidedly more positive look about them than their German equivalents.

What really seems striking to me is the difference in outlook being expressed by the retailers in the respective countries. According to the German report:

Although retailers were downbeat about their actual sales in August, latest data pointed to a surge in optimism about the prospects for sales in September. The degree of positive sentiment about the outlook for sales in one month’s time was the most marked since April 2008. Almost one-quarter of survey respondents anticipate sales to beat their initial forecasts. A number of retailers linked their optimism to improving conditions in the domestic economy.

On the other hand, the French report talks of caution among those interviewed:

The value of goods ordered by French retailers for resale decreased for a second straight month in August. Panellists indicated that they preferred to take a cautious approach to stock decisions at the present time. Correspondingly, inventories declined at the fastest rate since January.

One wonders what the basis for such expectations actually are. It couldn’t possibly be that they are being influenced by the press and media coverage of the situation, could it, since in neither case do I see the expectations as especially realistic. The French seem to be too pessimistic, and the Germans way too optimistic.

Meanwhile over in Italy it was plus ça change, as retail sales continued their now customary decline (if at a rather weaker pace than in recent months), with the consequence that the Eurozone Retail Sales Index suggested that sales across the Euro Area fell very slightly in August (on aggregate).

Well, all meat for Monsieur Trichet to chew on before Thursday’s meeting.

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