當七翻身遇上七厘詛咒

7月11日，周一。五窮六絕七翻身，講係咁講，但世界立立亂，凡事豈能盡如人意？半個月未到，美國經濟、中國通脹、歐債危機，不是朝着惡化的方向發展，便是暫時看不到改善迹象，尷尬卻尷尬在，炒寬鬆銀根央行放水又未是時候，中美歐都在等。

不過，等還等，歐洲那邊山雨欲來，危機蔓延至歐羅區第三大經濟體意大利，情況一旦失控，非同小可，投資者不能不格外留神。長話短說，有二事值得一提：①意大利證監針對炒家採取行動，既禁止無貨沽空股票（naked short-selling），又明令借貨拋空者在淨短倉達到上市公司已發行股本0.2％後即時披露；②德國《世界報》周一報道，歐洲央行希望將歐盟救助基金規模擴大一倍，由7500億增至1.5萬億歐羅，以防止債務危機向意大利擴散。

沽空客須披露持倉

對上述第一點，老畢並無特別意見，惟頗覺「有趣」。意大利證監下令沽空客即時披露持倉狀況，理由是要「增加市場透明度」。作為監管機構，責之所在，有此要求合情合理。然而，在股市火紅火綠一漲再漲時，何以不見監管當局有此針對沽空客的舉措？難道「增加透明度」只適用於跌市，升市卻可以「黑廂作業」？

意國形勢，第二點才是關鍵。歐洲央行的話等於說，歐盟當初建構「歐洲金融穩定設施」（EFSF）時，從未想過意大利需要救援這一可能性。此事一旦發生，基金不敷應用，不說自明。按照歐洲央行的估算，加入「意大利因素」後，基金規模至少得擴大一倍！在原有的EFSF中，德國為7500億歐羅救助基金作出了2110億歐羅的貢獻，佔比達28％。假設基金規模擴大一倍而德國所佔比例維持不變，那麼在原先2110億歐羅的基礎上，柏林的貢獻便得倍增至4220億歐羅。德國納稅人（選民）的反應如何，不問可知。

骨牌倒塌的速度雖可以快得驚人，惟在正常情況下，皆是一塊接一塊有秩序地倒下。歐債危機爆發以來，大家先後目睹希臘、愛爾蘭、葡萄牙一國接一國向歐盟／IMF求救；「正路」地想，下一個出事的國家離不開西班牙。不知炒家是否覷準市場這點心理，直取意大利，以求殺歐盟一個措手不及？無論如何，意國落難，不堪設想。

記得在去年「歐豬」債市頻頻遇襲時，老畢提過「7厘詛咒」這回事，意思是一國的十年期債息在升至7厘時，不論政府如何三令五申不必求救，不出數周，當局就會像什麼話也沒說過，hats in hands等人救，希臘、愛爾蘭、葡萄牙無不如此。

意大利目前離這個危險地帶尚有不足2厘的安全水位，Evolution Securities分析師Gary Jenkins做了一個「臨界點」分析，根據希、愛、葡在危機期間，十年期債息用了多少時間升抵7厘，替意大利「算算命」。

以5.5厘為起步點，希臘、愛爾蘭、葡萄牙三國十年期債息升穿6厘，平均用了43個交易日；由6厘升至6.5厘，時間縮短至24個交易日；由6.5厘去到7厘以上，平均只用了15個交易日。換句話說，債息阻力位一關比一關易破，以價而論則是支持位迅速失守，演變成free fall，三國政府無一能避過投降求救厄運。

意大利十年債息於短短五周內從4.62厘升至5.26厘【圖1】，而7、8、9三個月皆有大量新債排隊在市場上拍賣，「7厘詛咒」會否更快殺到埋意國，豈能不密切注意？

美滙指數與現實脫節

芝加哥商品期貨交易所（CME）近日宣布，有鑑於人民幣在岸和離岸存款以至貿易結算規模不斷擴大，市場對人民幣風險管理工具需求殷切，CME將於8月22日推出美元兌人民幣外滙期貨產品，以滿足這種需求。

歐債危機波及意大利，市場避險情緒升溫，金價上揚，美滙指數則逼近76水平【圖2】。

講開美滙指數，從其六種貨幣組成來看，你會發現這個指數與現實世界脫節。

歐羅在籃子中比重達58.6％，接着是日圓12.6％，英鎊11.9％，加元9.1％，瑞典克朗4.2％和瑞士法郎3.6％。

可是，經貿易加權計算（2010年數字），歐羅的比重應為17.79％，日圓8.27％，英鎊4.13％，加元14.7％，瑞典克朗和瑞士法郎分別只有0.96％和1.54％。人民幣如果身在其中，權重應達17.93％，比歐羅尤有過之。

芝加哥商品期貨交易所引入美元兌人民幣外滙期貨產品，作為一種參考指標以至貨幣ETF指數基準，美滙指數是否亦有與時並進的必要？

放大圖片

Running in the red: Among GOP, anti-tax orthodoxy runs deep

The Republican Party once had a home for the thinking of Tom Coburn, Mike Crapo and Saxby Chambliss. But that party is long gone.

The three U.S. senators banded together a few months ago in support of higher tax revenue as a means of balancing the federal budget. Even with drastic spending cuts, they concluded, Washington could not vanquish its soaring $14.3 trillion debt without additional income.

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Congressional Republicans and Democrats have waged a long fight in trying to agree on a budget plan to slash federal spending and avert a government shutdown.

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Motion graphic: A guide to understanding the federal debt

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• Among GOP, anti-tax orthodoxy runs deep
• PHOTOS: Evolution of GOP tax policy
• VIDEO: Coburn says talks may spur budget
• Budget and debt ceiling glossary: A guide to understanding the debate

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Running in the red

Part 1: How the U.S. detoured to massive debt

Such reasoning was common in the GOP circa 1963, when Republicans denounced tax cuts proposed by President John F. Kennedy as a road to red ink and rampant inflation. But today’s GOP adheres to a “no new taxes” orthodoxy that has proved far more powerful than the desire to balance the budget. As House Speaker John A. Boehner has said: Raising taxes is “unacceptable and a non-starter.”

This orthodoxy is now woven so deeply into the party’s identity that all but 13 of 288 GOP lawmakers in Congress have signed a formal pledge not to raise taxes. The strategist who invented the pledge, Grover G. Norquist, compares it to a brand, like Coca-Cola, built on “quality control” so that Republican voters know they will get “the same thing every time.”

Loyalty to the brand is so strong that no Republican has voted for a major federal tax increase since 1991, Norquist says. It is so widespread that more than a dozen governors and hundreds of state legislators now count themselves as adherents. And it is so well defended that its followers are constantly patrolling at both the state and federal levels for new forms of trespass.

In California, the pledge is interpreted to prohibit state lawmakers from asking voters to decide whether certain existing taxes should be extended. In Pennsylvania, the pledge is cited as a barrier to imposing an “impact” fee on the environmentally questionable business of extracting gas from underground shale.

On Capitol Hill, Norquist has admonished Coburn (Okla.), Crapo (Idaho) and Chambliss (Ga.) for suggesting a tax option for tackling the debt: reducing credits and deductions worth an estimated $1 trillion a year. Although most of the cash would be used to lower tax rates for everyone, a portion would be dedicated to restoring national solvency.

No good, says Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform. Under the pledge, raising revenue in any way requires an equal tax cut elsewhere to avoid expanding the size of government. And, yes, that sometimes means protecting tax breaks that Republicans view as bad public policy, Norquist and his supporters say.

The GOP’s three-decade-old campaign against taxes has clearly had a significant impact. Neither major party would advocate a return to the 1970s, when people earning more than $200,000 a year faced a top rate of 70 percent. But the top rate is now half that and, partly because of the recent recession, tax collections have fallen to their lowest level as a share of the economy in 60 years.

“Grover’s not realistic,” said former senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a self-described “Reagan robot” elected to Congress in 1980. Gregg retired last year after serving with Coburn and Crapo on the bipartisan fiscal commission that recommended stabilizing borrowing by trimming tax breaks and sharply cutting spending.

With the number of people on Medicare and Social Security set to double, Gregg said, “your government is inevitably going to grow. And you’re either going to have to finance that, or you’re going to end up running the country into the ditch.”

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Congressional Republicans and Democrats have waged a long fight in trying to agree on a budget plan to slash federal spending and avert a government shutdown.

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prominent Republicans have urged a more flexible approach to taxes. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan joined the chorus Friday, dropping his support for the 2001 George W. Bush tax cuts. Greenspan told CNBC he’s so “scared” by the debt that he now favors a return to the higher rates of the Clinton administration.

Motion graphic: A guide to understanding the federal debt

Part 1: How the U.S. detoured to massive debt

Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist who served as chief economic adviser in the Reagan White House, supports the commission’s approach to raising money by ending tax breaks.

“When the government gives a tax credit to homeowners who buy solar energy panels, it’s just like giving them a cash subsidy to buy those panels,” Feldstein wrote last week in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, suggesting that the value of deductions and credits be capped at 2 percent of adjusted income.

“Although government accounting rules treat the end of a tax credit or the limit of a tax deduction as a revenue increase, the economic effect is the same as a cut in spending,” Feldstein wrote. “Anyone who favors less government spending should also favor cutting tax expenditures.”

But Norquist argues that equating tax breaks with spending “is a threat to the modern Republican Party’s worldview,” which calls for a vastly smaller government and “dramatically reducing the tax drag on the economy.”

That worldview supports eliminating tax breaks, Norquist said, but only if all the proceeds are used to push tax rates “down as far as possible.” The work of reducing the national debt must be done entirely by shrinking government, he said. Any compromise that includes taxes would hinder that goal and taint the Republican brand.

Norquist compared Coburn, the most outspoken of the Senate trio, to a “malignant” cell in the body politic. “So,” Norquist said, “we use chemo and radiation to protect all the healthy cells around it, so it doesn’t grow and metastasize.”

Rewriting doctrine

The germ of the pledge came to Norquist, he said, when he was 14 and thinking about a teacher’s comment that no one knows who his or her congressman is. If Republicans were known as the party that never raised taxes, he recalls thinking, they would be spared spending “millions of dollars explaining to you who they are and what they stand for.” They could just “stand up and say, ‘I’m the Republican.’ And you go: ‘He won’t raise my taxes and he won’t steal my guns. Got it.’ ”

At the time, Richard M. Nixon had just been elected president, and Republicans had a reputation as the party of fiscal responsibility: Dwight Eisenhower maintained wartime tax rates throughout his eight-year presidency, dramatically reducing the national debt. Congressional Republicans objected to Kennedy’s tax cut, arguing that any reduction in revenue should be pared with spending cuts to avoid ballooning deficits. Nixon supported extending a surtax to pay for the Vietnam War. And his successor, Gerald R. Ford, opposed a permanent tax cut in 1974, fearing budget deficits, according to historian Bruce Bartlett, a “lapsed Republican” who has written extensively about GOP fiscal policy.

Three factors helped rewrite the party’s economic doctrine, Bartlett said: In the late 1970s, key Republicans concluded that lower tax rates would boost the flagging economy. The new theory of supply-side economics held that such a tax cut would spur so much growth that it would actually generate more revenue. And the Proposition 13 tax revolt hit California, demonstrating the power of tax cuts as a political issue.

Ronald Reagan capitalized on growing anti-tax sentiment in his campaign for president and quickly pushed a tax package that slashed rates, a move credited with energizing the long-sluggish economy. Reagan went back to Congress in 1986 with a sweeping overhaul of the tax code that pushed the top rate down to 28 percent. At Reagan’s request, Norquist founded Americans for Tax Reform and the pledge was born.

Gallery

Congressional Republicans and Democrats have waged a long fight in trying to agree on a budget plan to slash federal spending and avert a government shutdown.

Graphic

Motion graphic: A guide to understanding the federal debt

More On This Story

• Among GOP, anti-tax orthodoxy runs deep
• PHOTOS: Evolution of GOP tax policy
• VIDEO: Coburn says talks may spur budget
• Budget and debt ceiling glossary: A guide to understanding the debate

View all Items in this Story

Running in the red

Part 1: How the U.S. detoured to massive debt

In his race to succeed Reagan, George H.W. Bush famously embraced the pledge, saying “read my lips, no new taxes.” But as president, he raised tax rates as part of a balanced-budget deal with Democrats. Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton in 1992 “proved for all time, that even though tax increases may be justified economically, they are never justified politically if you’re a Republican,” Bartlett said.

“Since then it’s been Republican dogma that deficits don’t matter and the only thing that matters for the economy is cutting taxes,” he said. “And Grover Norquist has become the enforcer of this dogma.”

‘Impure thoughts’

The rise of the anti-tax tea party movement in 2008 further hardened the party’s stance against taxes. How is the pledge enforced? Typically, Republican candidates sign the pledge to avoid attack in the primary. Once in office, violators might find that Norquist has contacted Republican voters in their state or district to inform them that their senator or representative is having “impure thoughts,” as he put it.

Norquist has “these amazing mailing lists. Just tens of millions of people,” said Gregg, who has been a target.

At the state level, a vast network of foot soldiers stands ready to discipline local politicians who fail to walk the no-tax line. One of the most high-profile battles is being waged in Sacramento, where Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is trying to persuade GOP lawmakers to join Democrats in extending the largest tax increase in state history, which is set to expire this month.

Last month, Norquist spent several days in the state, urging Republicans to stand firm. His argument is likely to be pretty compelling: In 2009, after enacting deep spending cuts, six GOP lawmakers helped then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) raise sales, income and auto taxes to close a $42 billion budget gap.

All six paid a price. The Republican leaders in both the House and Senate were deposed. The other four either retired or lost bids for higher office.

Senate Republicans dumped Dave Cogdill as their leader in a midnight coup before the tax deal was even approved. “They were hearing from their constituents and Grover Norquist, saying, ‘You got to do everything you can to fight this thing,’ ” Cogdill said in an interview.

Cogdill later retired from the Senate. He now serves as county tax assessor in his hometown of Modesto. He said he wishes he had been able to keep the pledge, but he didn’t see any alternative to raising taxes, given the state’s alarming financial condition.

Although he agrees with Norquist that taxes are too high in California, he’s not sure he would sign the pledge again. Pledges, he said, make it hard to respond to changing circumstances.

Republicans “have lost the art of compromise,” Cogdill said. “If we don’t get everything we want, then we let the whole thing burn.”

This story is part of The Post’s continuing examination of the origins and consequences of the federal debt and the debate over what to do about it.

Major tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 also contributed to the decline in revenue — and helped drive up budget deficits. Today, the spiraling debt ranks well ahead of too-high taxes on the list of economic concerns. And the GOP’s hard line on the issue stands, alongside Democratic resistance to cutting federal retirement benefits, as the biggest obstacle to a bipartisan agreement to tackle that problem.

Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to massive debt

The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis.

In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.

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From surplus to debt

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Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner discusses the U.S. budget deficit. Geithner, speaking with Peter Cook on Bloomberg Television's ‘’In the Loop,’’ also discusses banking regulation and the European debt crisis. (April 19)

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• Running in the red: How the U.S. detoured to massive debt
• Gallery: Battle over the budget
• Budget, debt ceiling glossary: A guide to the debate
• Video: Geithner urges enforcement on enforceable limits

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Running in the red

Part 2: How the GOP’s no-tax orthodoxy came to be

Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.

Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Big-ticket spending initiated by the Bush administration accounts for 12 percent of the shift. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion in new borrowing. A new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients contributed another $272 billion. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bank bailout, which infuriated voters and led to the defeat of several legislators in 2010, added just $16 billion — and TARP may eventually cost nothing as financial institutions repay the Treasury.

Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.

As Congress prepares this week to launch a high-stakes battle over whether to raise the legal limit on borrowing, the analyses offer a clearer view of the drivers of the debt — and of the difficulty of re-balancing the budget without new tax revenue.