Forget Greece - the real debt crisis is still to come
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Associate Editor
David Stevenson Feb 08, 2010
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Last week was just like 2008 again. The FTSE 100 was up 2.5% on the week by mid-Wednesday, only to fall by almost 5% before Friday's close.
There were plenty of things to blame the poor performance on. We had some poor – and very confusing - jobless figures in the US (What's good about the employment data?). Then of course there's the fast-growing eurozone debt crisis. Greece might be in the biggest mess, but as John Stepek explained last Thursday, other borrowers in the region are also coming under the microscope.
But the bad news is that this isn't just about a few peripheral eurozone countries, or some dodgy unemployment stats. There are plenty more global debt time bombs primed and ready to explode.
The ultimate damage to the financial system could make 2008 look like a walk in the park. Don't touch government bonds with a bargepole. Here's why...
Bad debts are set to hammer British banks
The economic boom that ended in 2007 always seemed too good to be true. That's because it was. It was built on borrowing, much of it personal. In the UK, the ratio of household debt to disposable income hit its highest-ever level of 160% by mid-2008, according to the Office of National Statistics.
Now the game's changed completely. Incomes have been squeezed by rising job losses and the economy going wrong. Apart from at Christmas times, consumer loan growth has been declining in almost a straight line for the last two years. In fact, credit is now contracting.
But there are still millions of over-indebted Britons. And many are now finding it too difficult to make ends meet. In 2009, 134,000 people in England and Wales went into some form of personal insolvency. That's the highest-ever recorded figure and up 26% on 2008. "The huge number demonstrates the real effect the recession is having on the average person in the UK", says Pat Boyden at accountancy group PwC.
British banks had to double their credit card write-offs in 2009's third quarter. And things could be about to get much worse. "Expect to see growing numbers of personal insolvencies over the next 12 months", says Steve Rees at debt advisers Vincent Bond. That will mean banks facing bigger bad debts, and even less credit card lending.
In short, it'll be very nasty. But this is small beer compared to some of the debt time bombs that are ready to go off around the rest of the world.
Greece's problems are nothing compared to the global picture
It isn't just British consumers who've taken against debt. Private borrowing is slowing everywhere. US consumer credit has shrunk for a record 11 months in a row.
But governments round the world have been aggressively picking up the slack. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the G20 – the 20 largest industrialized countries – has spent more than $2.2 trillion to try to get global growth going again. Much of this money has been borrowed. That's just adding to the debt pile those governments had built up earlier.
Sure, financial markets are fretting that within two years, Greece will have racked up public borrowings equal to more than 120% of GDP. But that's nothing compared to the global picture. Dylan Grice at Société Générale has crunched the numbers for the whole of the EU, the UK and the US. He's found that the average total net liabilities - including unfunded pensions, social security and healthcare - of these countries' governments emerged at a terrifying 400% of GDP.
"After the stimulus binge, it's a debt hangover", as William Pesek puts it in BusinessWeek. Even if governments stop overspending now, they'll have to compete more for cash with the private sector. So they'll have to pay much higher rates on the bonds they'll need to sell.
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This will drive up the cost of capital for everyone. That in turn will curb private sector investment. Without that investment, we won't get the levels of economic growth required to generate the taxes that governments need to keep debt at manageable levels. Life will also get even harder for heavily-borrowed individuals. It's a truly vicious circle.
So things look bad, even if governments stop overspending now. But the trouble is, they won't stop over spending. Paul Farrell at Marketwatch has been digging deeper into America's debt mountain. He spotlights a range of areas, such as homeland security, defence and local government, where spending is fast overshooting. The only way the US authorities will be able to plug the financial gaps will be to borrow even more money.
"Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children", says Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan (which showed how history is littered with rare and unpredictable events). "They can get out of control very quickly". No wonder he's urging "every single human being" to bet on US Treasury bond prices falling – which would happen automatically if yields are pushed up.
You must avoid government bonds
The same applies to UK government bonds – gilts. Tim Price of PFP Wealth Management recently wrote in The Price Report: "It is possible that what we are seeing in Greece may ultimately trigger an escalation of the sovereign debt problems facing much of the west. If Greece were to default (we cannot presume that Germany, for one, will have a limitless appetite to bail out its European neighbours, given the lengthy pain it suffered after unification), bond market pressure would then be applied to the other weak links in Europe, such as Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and Spain and from there in turn to the UK and the US." Even if Greece is bailed out, "we would likely see a resumption of problems in Eastern Europe and other emerging but fragile economies."
So what's the bottom line?
Keep well clear of UK, US and European government bonds. And remember that soaring bond yields will be very bad news for the prices of cyclical shares that depend on economic growth. That's why we keep suggesting defensive stocks, which don't.
Farrell believes "the third great Wall Street meltdown of the 21st century is coming, which will ignite the Great Depression that has been simply delayed by the stimulus bonanzas and bailouts".
Maybe that's a bit of an apocalyptic view – we'll see. But there's no doubt the markets will soon be facing some vastly bigger debt problems than just those of Greece.
Our recommended article for today
Most of the world's governments may be cash-strapped, but their spending on weapons keeps on rising. And in those countries where cash isn't constrained, arms buying is set to soar. Here we look at the defence sector, and pick the best company to invest in now.
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by
David Stevenson
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