希腊退出欧元区所能造成的真正威胁

                                                                                      John Stepek，2015.6.22
上周我在度假，并且没有跟办公室联系。
就在我离开之前，我的同时Merryn给我发了一封邮件说：“我真不敢相信你会错过希腊离开欧元区！”
我承认自己当时感觉到了一阵刺痛。迄今为止，我已经跟踪了这个冗长的故事长达三年，我讨厌错过故事的结局。
我没有必要担心。希腊在本周还会有另外一个“最后期限”。并且，如果谁能打赌说这是最终的一个期限，那么我承认他比我勇敢。
但是，我们是否过分乐观？
希腊的另外一天、另外一次危机
欧元区今天召开了紧急会议，这是试图与希腊达成协议的另外一个“十一小时”。我已经没有兴趣了解整个辩论过程，我相信你也没有兴趣。但是以防万一，我在下面列举出了一些节选。
希腊无法偿还自己欠下的债务。为了从欧洲其他国家获得债务减免，希腊需要改革经济。但是希腊不愿意改革，同时它也不愿意退出欧元区，而这如果它不能偿还债务的话将很有可能发生。
所以，希腊面临着两难的境地。同样的故事在过去三年中经常发生。
而市场不能就希腊选择任何一种方式而对其进行谴责。正如John Auhter在金融时报（FT）中写到的那样，欧洲“自从希腊在一月份大选开始就一直没有改变。”
什么会触发“明斯基时刻”？
市场因为上周列出的理由而自满。事实是，我们从2009年3月份金融危机复苏以来就有很多不愉快的经历。但它们丝毫没有削弱牛市的威力。投资者也由开始愤怒地怀疑演变为现在相信央行可以在水面上行走。即使熊市也流露出一种顺从接受的态度——这看起来很糟糕。并且，央行仍然掌控者市场的发展，很难看出有什么事情可以导致美梦破灭。
在这种大背景下，你打算如何投资？你可以辩论称市场是非理性的，但是如果在全球央行都很好地掌控着经济的情况下做空的话，这无疑是一种金融自杀。市场说：“不要与美联储做对”，这在过去六年中没有被论证为完全正确的。
你可以对希腊退出欧元区的任何事情都感觉到害怕，但是希腊迄今已经在欧元区的边缘至少三年了。如果你选择将所有的时间都用于保存现金实力上，比如，等待下一个大事件，那么你将错过大量的收益。危机的疲劳感可以让你忘却整个市场——上帝知道我目前就处于这个阶段，我只想这件事快点结束，这样我们就能谈论别的事情了。
问题就像我上周提到的那样，这也是Hyman Minsky正确的地方。这完全是心理学。危机过后，我们都会兴奋，每次市场喊“狼来了！”我们就会寻求资金安全之处。
但是如果市场一直喊狼来了却什么事业没有发生。最终，我们发现自己忽略了市场关于狼来了的呼喊。相反，我们在最危险的地方进仓，因为这将会带来最好的收益。直到有一天，市场上的狼真的来了，那时候我们已经远离安全之处，市场开始了一场真正的杀戮。
是否存在央行无法解决的问题？
那么，让我们考虑一下潜在的触发因素。接下来的危机是源于央行无法解决的一些棘手问题。
另外一个“雷曼兄弟”不足以对央行造成困难，因为我们都知道美联储不仅印刷纸币而且进行资本重组——救助。LTCM（90年代末的大型对冲基金）和Lehman已经建立起处理主要金融机构崩盘的策略，它们应该能够处理这类事情。
但是央行更为棘手的问题是处理主权债务。如果你所在的国家很明显不能偿还债务，并且通过印刷纸币来解决，那么你就是在“货币化国家债务”。央行不会允许国家这么做。换句话说，救助一个国家比救助一个银行要棘手得多。（如果你想知道，当前的量化宽松政策表面上是在提高货币供给，而不是给政府支出提供融资）。
假如希腊离开欧元区。那么希腊本身或许不是一个问题。希腊计划离开欧元区已经有很长一段时间，任何投资者都有时间对冲。也许真正的问题是，希腊退出欧元区显示出了欧元的货币兑换机制而不是一个货币联盟。这一点很重要是因为欧元区其他那些无法偿还债务的国家也将面临风险。它们向周边国家出售债券推动了这一事件的发生。
事实上，市场给欧元区提出了最难的一个问题：你是一个联盟，共享所有的债务，当弱小的成员需要帮助时，强大的成员会挺身而出？或者，你是一个由独立的国家根据协议组成的联盟，并遵循统一汇率？
英国读者知道当市场对经济保持在一个汇率机制的能力失去信心的时候将会发生什么。它迫使改变，比如1992年英镑的“白色星期三”。
对欧元区来说，债券收益很有可能再次分道扬镳。换句话说，与德国相比，较弱的国家所收取的利率将会上升。这是关于政治，不是欧央行权力范围内可以抵御的。欧元区最根本的政治问题是决策者往往与选民的意愿相对。所以，这类问题进一步整合将对欧央行拯救欧元区造成很大困难。
欧洲问题的核心是民主赤字，一直以来是欧洲的最大弱点。欧洲正在缓慢但坚定地透露出它的赤字规模。
所以，希腊的退出本身并不值得害怕。事实是，它有可能导致民众对西班牙或者意大利离开欧元区的多米诺骨牌效应。而这些国家对全球市场来说有非常大的重要性。

The real threat that a Greek exit poses to the eurozone
By: John Stepek22/06/20155 comments
I was on holiday last week, and out of touch with the office.
Just before I left, my colleague Merryn sent me an email saying: “I can’t believe you might miss Grexit!”
I’ll admit that I felt a stab of anguish. I’ve been covering this interminable story for three years or more now, and I’d hate to miss the denouement.
I needn’t have worried. The Greeks have yet another ‘last-minute’ deadline this week. And it’d be a braver man than me who bets on it being the final one.
But are we all getting a little too complacent?
Another day, another crisis in Greece
There’s a eurozone emergency meeting (funny how that phrase just trips off the keyboard these days) today. It’s yet another ‘11th hour’ attempt to reach a deal with Greece. I have no interest in running through the arguments again, and I’m sure you don’t either. But just in case, here’s the potted version.
Greece can’t pay back the money it owes. To get debt relief from the rest of Europe, it needs to reform its economy. But Greece doesn’t want to reform its economy. Nor does it want to leave the euro, which is very likely to happen if it defaults on its debts.
So either one side or the other blinks first, or Greece leaves the eurozone. Same story as it’s been for the last three years or so.
And markets, apparently, really couldn’t give a damn what Greece does either way. As John Authers notes in the FT, the euro is “virtually unchanged since January’s Greek election sparked this phase in the crisis”.
Is that wise?
What could trigger a ‘Minsky moment’?
Markets are complacent for the reasons I outlined last Monday. The simple truth is that we’ve been through any number of potentially nasty scenarios since the recovery from the financial crisis began in March 2009. So far none of them has made a dent in the bull market.
Investors have gone from raging scepticism to a belief that central banks can walk on water. Even the bears now exude a sort of resigned acceptance – things look ugly, but it’s hard to see what can upset the apple cart while central banks remain in control.
Given that backdrop, how are you meant to invest? You can argue that the market is irrational, but shorting it is financial suicide when the world’s central banks remain in printing mode. The market saying: “Don’t fight the Fed” has never been proved so right as over the last six years.
And you can fret all you want about Grexit, but Greece has been on the point of abandoning the eurozone for at least three years now. If you’d spent all that time sitting in cash, say, waiting for the next big one, you’d have missed out on plenty of gains.
Markets can be forgiven for feeling a bit of crisis fatigue – lord knows I’m most definitely at the stage where I just want it to be over with so we can talk about something else.
Trouble is, as I also pointed out last week, this is why Hyman Minsky was right. It’s all about psychology. After a crash, we’re all jumping at our own shadows, and every time the market cries ‘wolf!’ we rush for safety.
But the market keeps calling ‘wolf!’, and nothing happens. And eventually we find ourselves ignoring the cries of ‘wolf!’ – instead, we start to head for the most dangerous patches of pasture we can, because they offer the best pickings.
Then one day, the market cries ‘wolf!’ and this time it isn’t wrong. And by that point we’ve all wandered so far from safety that the result is sheer carnage.
Is there any problem that central banks cannot fix?
So let’s think about a potential trigger. The next crisis has to arise from something that is tricky for central banks to deal with.
Another ‘Lehman Brothers’ probably wouldn’t cut it, because we know now that the Fed would just print money and organise a recapitalisation – a bailout. The strategy for dealing with major financial institution blow-ups has been established by LTCM (the big hedge fund blow-up in the late 1990s) and Lehman. They should be able to contain that sort of thing.
But a far more ‘tricky’ problem for central banks to deal with is sovereign debt. If it becomes clear that your country cannot repay its debts, and you print money to allow it do so, then you are ‘monetising the national debt’. Central banks aren’t allowed to do that. In other words, bailing out a whole country is much trickier than bailing out a bank.
(In case you’re wondering, the current quantitative easing programmes are ostensibly all about driving up the money supply, not financing government spending. You can argue that this is all semantics and perception, but semantics and perception matter in this case.)
Let’s say Greece leaves the euro. Greece itself may not be a problem. Grexit has been on the cards for so long, that anyone with exposure has had plenty of time to hedge it.
But maybe the real problem is that a Greek exit reveals the euro as an exchange-rate mechanism, rather than a currency union.
That matters because then markets start to look at other eurozone countries that might be at risk of failing to repay their debts. They start to push the issue by selling off bonds in peripheral countries.
In effect, the market poses the hardest question for the eurozone to answer: are you a union, where liabilities are shared and the strongest members cough up as and when needed to bail out the weaker members, or are you a group of disparate countries united only by an agreement to stick to a one-size-fits-all exchange rate?
Fellow British readers know exactly what happens when the market loses faith in an economy’s ability to stay within an exchange rate mechanism. It forces a change, as per 1992’s ‘White Wednesday’ for sterling.
In the case of the eurozone, it’s likely to start with bond yields diverging again. In other words, the interest rates weaker countries are charged will rise compared to German bunds, say.
And this isn’t something the European Central Bank (ECB) can defend against without pushing its mandate beyond the limits. This is all about politics. And the fundamental problem with politics in the eurozone is that the people in charge tend to be going against the wishes of the voters. So further integration of the sort that would allow the ECB to ‘save’ the eurozone is likely to be hard to drive through.
The democratic deficit that lies at the heart of Europe was always its biggest weakness. The euro is slowly but surely revealing the scale of that deficit.
So while Grexit itself might be nothing to fear, the fact that it could lead to worries about Spain or Italy leaving the euro may trigger that domino effect that everyone worries about. And those countries are certainly significant enough to rattle global markets.

本文翻译由兄弟财经提供

文章来源：http://moneyweek.com/greece-threat-grexit-poses-to-eurozone/#disqus_thread