Debt, defaults, and devaluations: why this market crash is like nothing we’ve seen before
A pernicious cycle of collapsing commodities, corporate defaults, and currency wars loom over the global economy. Can anything stop it from unravelling?
By Mehreen Khan for telegraph.co.uk
A global recession is on the way. This truism of economics holds at any point in which the world is not in the grips of a contraction.
The real question is always when and how deep the upcoming downturn will be.
“The crash will come, but it would be nice if it came two years from now”, Thomas Thygesen, head of economics at SEB told over 200 commodity investors and analysts in London last month.
His audience was rapt with unusual attention. They could be forgiven for thinking the slump had not already arrived.
Commodity prices have crashed by two thirds since their peaks in 2014. Oil has borne the brunt of the sell-off, suffering the worst price collapse in modern history. Brent crude has fallen from $115 a barrel in the summer of 2014, to just $27.70 in mid-January.
We are in a very unusual situation where market sentiment is of a different nature to anything we’ve seen before
Plenty of investors sitting in the blue-lit, cavernous surrounds of Bloomberg’s London HQ would have had their fingers burnt by the price capitulation.
• Mapped: How the world became awash with oil
“They tell you should start your presentations with a joke, but making jokes at a commodities seminar is hardly appropriate these days,” Thygesen told his nervous audience.
Major oil price falls have a number of historical precedents. Today’s glutted oil market is often compared to the crash of 1986, the last major episode over global over-supply. Back in the late 90s, a barrel of Brent crude fell to as low as $10 in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.
A perfect storm
But is the current oil price collapse really like anything the world economy has ever experienced?
For many market watchers, a confluence of factors – led by oil, but encompassing China, the emerging world, and financial markets – are all brewing to create a perfect storm in a global economy that has barely come to terms with the Great Recession.
“We are in a very unusual situation where market sentiment is of a different nature to anything we’ve seen before,” says Thygesen.
Unlike previous pre-recessionary eras, the current sell-off has seen commodity prices, equities and credit conditions all move in dangerous lockstep.
The S&P 500 trading pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
Although a 75pc oil price collapse should represent an unmitigated positive for the world’s fuel thirsty consumers, the sheer scale of the price rout is already imperiling the finances of producer nations from Nigeria to Azerbaijan, and is now threatening to unleash a wave of bankruptcies across corporate America.
It is the prospect of this vicious feedback loop – where low oil prices create financial tail risks that spill over into the real economy – which could now propel the world into a “full blown crisis” adds Thygesen.
So will it materialise?
The world economy is throwing up reasons to worry, as the globe’s largest emerging markets have shown signs of deterioration over the last six months, says Olivier Blanchard, the former long-serving chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
My biggest fear is precisely that the dramatic shift in mood becomes self-fulfilling
Olivier Blanchard
“China’s growth is probably less than officially reported. Russia and Brazil are doing very badly. South Africa is flirting with recession. Even India may not be doing as well as was forecast,” says Blanchard, who left the Fund after seven years late last year.
As it stands however, he says market ructions still represent a classic case of “herd” behaviour.
“Investors worry that other investors know something bad, and so just sell, although they themselves have no new information.”
Blanchard spent seven years firefighting the worst financial crisis in history at the IMF
But a tipping point may well be approaching. According to Blanchard’s calculations, a 20pc decline in stock markets that persists for more than six months, will translate into a decline in consumption of between 0.5pc to 1.0pc.
“This would be a serious shock. My biggest fear is precisely that the dramatic shift in mood becomes self-fulfilling”.
The first domino to fall
For now, oil-induced financial stress is concentrated in the energy sector.
With Brent set to languish around $30-35 barrel for the rest of the year, prices will persist below the $40-60 barrel break-even point that renders the bulk of US oil and gas companies profitable.
Spreads on high yield US energy corporates have soared to unprecedented highs. “They make Lehman look like a walk in the park” says Thygesen.
More than a third of the entire US high yield bond index is now vulnerable to crude prices remaining low or falling even further, according to calculations from Oxford Economics.
As a result, 2016 is set to see the first wave of corporate bankruptcies in the oil and gas sector. Highly leveraged US shale companies will be the first be picked off. Should escalating defaults have a further depressant effect on oil prices, it could unleash a tidal wave of corporate bankruptcies in the world’s largest economy.
Conditions that usually pave the way for mounting defaults are currently met in the US
Oxford Economics
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