Tear Up Your Paper Money

Modern currency is nothing without trust that governments that use it will back it. And if the once-strong euro can break, what is safe? MoneyShow's Jim Jubak, also of Jubak's Picks, explains what he means.

So what is it about money that the leaders of the Eurozone don't get? Money has been around for a while, and it's not terribly complicated.

The key element is trust. That was true when money was a piece of metal that you could bite or bounce. Now that money is just a piece of paper, it's even truer. Today's money is nothing but trust.

That's why the euro crisis is so bizarre. The euro is, in theory, one of the world's great currencies. And yet, as this crisis has demonstrated, nobody actually stands behind it. There is no lender of last resort. There is no "full faith and credit." There's nobody on the other end of the promise.

And it's as if the leaders of the Eurozone wanted to go out of their way to prove it. They've taken us up to the velvet curtain and then themselves, with a self-satisfied smile, pulled it aside to show us that there is no Great Oz.

And in the process they've done major, and perhaps irretrievable, damage to their own currency and to the very idea of money in our time. If you can't trust the euro, what paper can you trust?

As Solid as the Solidus?
The idea of money may never have been grasped more clearly than in the Byzantine Empire, the great Roman Empire of the East.

From the time Constantine the Great minted the first gold solidus in 312 until the final coin was minted by Basil II, the Bulgar Slayer, around 1020, the solidus was minted at a steady rate of 72 coins to a Roman pound of gold, or 4.48 grams of gold per coin.

When coins came back to the imperial treasury—all taxes had to be paid in solidi—they were melted down and restruck. No wonder most Byzantine emperors were proud to put their own images on the solidus.

And it's clear that the Byzantine emperors understood the power that owning a trusted currency gave them in the world. One of the first acts of the empire after recovering from the chaos of caused by the attacks of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor and the Normans in Italy in the 11th century was to reverse the debasement of the currency that had begun in 1042.

By 1080, the solidus was down to 10% gold, as embattled emperors melted down older coins, diluted the gold with silver and then attempted to pay their mercenaries with cheaper money. The empire's own troops, however, refused to accept the solidus, which had been the most respected coin and the medium of exchange from India to the Baltic, as payment.

In 1092, once order was restored in the empire, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos replaced the debased coins with the hyperpyron, a new coin of 20.5-carat gold. The new coins contained 4.45 grams of gold.

That's a steady currency. A drop of 0.03 grams of gold per coin in roughly 800 years.

The Euro Is No Hyperpyron
Contrast that to the euro. The currency was created as if it would be a monument to stability. That's why there are no provisions in the treaties that created the euro for a country to leave the monetary union and go back to its own currency.

But the reality is that the euro is way more leveraged than the solidus, even at its worst. After all, even the debased solidus still contained 10% gold.

Start with the European Central Bank. The bank has official equity capital of just €6.5 billion, roughly $8.2 billion. That tiny bit of capital supports a balance sheet that now totals €3 trillion—about $3.8 trillion.

How is this possible? It's possible because the European Central Bank is essentially owned by the national central banks of Europe. They have contributed the bank's capital in exchange for ownership stakes in the bank. Through that structure, the European Central Bank has a claim on these national central banks.

It you think of it structurally, each national central bank owns a share of the European Central Bank's balance sheet. All those Spanish, Greek, and Italian government bonds, all those mortgage-backed assets, all those loans to French and German corporations that European banks have used as collateral for loans from the European Central Bank, they all ultimately belong, for better or worse, to national central banks.

Tangled and Off Target
And that's not the end of the European Central Bank's liabilities. There's also something called the Target2 Balance. (Target stands for Trans-European Automated Real-Time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System. Apparently the "s" in "settlement" is silent.)

Target2 handles payments among banks in the Eurozone and imbalances among Eurozone members. Membership in Target2 is mandatory for countries in the Eurozone. Membership is open to European Union members that don't use the euro, and in fact, six non-Eurozone central banks use Target2.

On one level, Target2 is a settlement system. On this level, the system works like this: European banks maintain accounts with their national central banks. When, say, a Spanish importer places an order with a German exporter and asks its bank to pay that exporter, the importer's Spanish bank transfers money to the German bank account of the exporter.

The Target2 system debits the Spanish bank's account at the Spanish central bank, the Banco de España, and credits the receiving German bank at Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank. The Spanish and German companies settle their credits and debits with their respective banks, which then settle with their respective national central banks.

The two central banks settle their accounts not by transferring actual assets (cash, for instance), but through liabilities and credits in the Target2 system. The Banco de España winds up with a liability and the Bundesbank with a credit.

But on another level, Target2 is an automatic funding system designed to cover trade imbalances among Eurozone members. If a country—let's say Spain again—imports more than it exports, it winds up with a big, and growing, liability in the Target2 system.

But doesn't have to transfer cash or other assets to the Bundesbank to settle those liabilities. It, in essence, winds up owing the Target2 system, which has, in turn, created a liability that is ultimately due to the Bundesbank, but that in the short term is actually funded by the Target2 system.

I think you can guess what has happened in recent years to Target2 liabilities and credits, as the Eurozone's weaker economies lost competitiveness and imported much more than they exported to Europe's stronger economies. The Target2 liabilities for the Eurozone's peripheral economies, including Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, climbed by €150 billion in April to €770 billion.

I don't have exactly comparable figures for the credits run up in the Target2 system by the Eurozone's stronger exporters, but in February the Bundesbank showed a positive credit balance of €576 billion.

Trust Is the Tipping Point
There's nothing magical about any of these numbers. There's no reason that a €1.9 trillion balance sheet—the size of the European Central Bank balance sheet a year ago—should be economically viable and a €3 trillion balance sheet shouldn't be, or that a €620 billion Target2 liability should be supportable and a €770 billion liability shouldn't be.

So why panic now? In the end, it comes down to trust. If those Byzantine mercenaries had been willing to accept the debased solidus in 1050 as good money, the fact that it was only 10% gold wouldn't have mattered.

Likewise, if the national central banks of Europe are willing to backstop the European Central Bank, and, more importantly, if everybody in the financial markets is willing to trust that willingness, the fact that the European Central Bank has just €6.5 billion in capital becomes irrelevant.

If banks and everybody in the financial markets believe that the Bundesbank and other Target2 creditors are willing to keep letting other central banks run up their liabilities, then the Target2 system is as good as gold. And the euro is solid.

But it works only if the trust in the system is there. And it's here that the leaders of the Eurozone have done real damage to their "money" in the way that they've handled this crisis.

Changing the Rules
Take a look at the Greek debt haircut, for example. As part of the rescue package negotiated with the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank, Greece forced its private-sector creditors into a "voluntary" 70% write-down on the value of their government bonds.

The deal might have been necessary in order for European leaders to agree to fund a Greek bailout package, but it had several "trust-busting" elements, which were pointed out by critics at the time.

First, the haircut imposed an after-the-fact change of the rules. Because of this, if you hold the debt of other national governments, you're entitled to wonder how the terms of your bonds might change in a crisis.

Second, the haircut was imposed only on the private-sector investors in Greek bonds. The European Central Bank did not have to write down the value of its significant portfolio of Greek bonds.

And, third, by imposing a write-down, the European Central Bank and its partners created the question of when it might happen again. The deal certainly raised the risk of holding sovereign debt in the Eurozone.

And Then There's the Breakup
Allowing the Greek crisis to go to a stage where a Greek exit from the euro is a real possibility has had a similar but even more profoundly negative effect on trust. Suddenly analysts are digging into the details of how the euro system works.

Quite frankly, you no more want to know how a modern paper currency is made than you want to know what goes into a cheap hot dog. Analysts and economists digging into the euro system have been shocked, shocked, in tones that echo Casablanca's Captain Renault, to discover leverage and risk in the system.

And once you head down that path, well, the scenery gets mighty gothic mighty quickly. We wind up with economists saying things like, "In a euro breakup, Germany will lose to 20% of its GDP when debtors renege on their Target2 liabilities," or, "The official sector (read the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) are owed €290 billion by Greece. Of that, €120 billion amounts to Target2 liabilities."

These are real issues only if 1) the euro does break up, and 2) levels of trust sink to such low levels that, like Byzantine mercenaries, no party in Europe is willing to trust the currency or its bookkeeping systems.

Even in the event of a euro breakup, the Bundesbank could simply print money or write itself a check, in the words of University College Dublin economics professor Karl Whelan, to cover what it's owed. That would seem a reasonable alternative to trying to extract €576 billion (or whatever) from German taxpayers to cover what is, from one perspective, a bookkeeping entity.

Of course, you can do things like print money or write yourself a check (and then not cash it, of course) only if trust in the system hasn't vanished. As the slow runs on Spanish banks (and the not-so-slow runs on Greek banks) demonstrate, though, there's not a lot of trust in the Eurozone financial system.

I think we're only a resentful and shortsighted Greek election result—and a ham-handed political reaction from the German, Finnish, Austrian, and Dutch governments—away from a decisive erosion in trust in the euro. The European Central Bank has already made it clear that it is not prepared to be a Federal Reserve-style lender of last resort.

So who, exactly, does stand behind the euro? Not Eurozone governments, it's clear—they can't agree to issue joint eurobonds. Not the Bundesbank, the strongest of the national central banks, which clearly thinks it has done enough.

So who, then, thinks the euro is worth defending and who would spend some billions on defense if that were what it took?

Paper Poses
And if the euro can dissolve, if the Eurozone can go back to deutschmarks and drachmas, then why should we have faith in any paper currency?

The breakup of the euro won't mean the breakup of the dollar or the yen or the real, but it sure would accelerate the search for a more secure depository of value than paper money. Even one that proclaims "In God we trust."

Full disclosure: I don’t own shares of any of the companies mentioned in this post in my personal portfolio. The mutual fund I manage, Jubak Global Equity Fund, may or may not now own positions in any stock mentioned in this post. For a full list of the stocks in the fund as of the end of March see the fund’s portfolio here.