S&P downgrades euro zone rescue fund

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – U.S. rating agency Standard & Poor’s cut its credit rating of the euro zone’s EFSF rescue fund on Monday, and Greece was under pressure to break a deadlock in debt swap talks if it is to avoid an unruly default.
French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said there was no need to shore up the European Financial Stability Facility after S&P downgraded it by one notch to AA+ from triple-A, echoing the view of Germany, the only major euro zone member to retain a top-notch credit rating.
S&P said in a statement the decision was all but inevitable following identical cuts three days earlier to the creditworthiness of France and Austria, two of the EFSF’s guarantors.
“We consider that credit enhancements that would offset what we view as the now-reduced creditworthiness of the EFSF’s guarantors and securities backing the EFSF’s issues are currently not in place,” the agency said in a statement.
“We have therefore lowered to AA+ the issuer credit rating of the EFSF, as well as the issue ratings on its long-term debt securities.”
Financial markets, which had fallen after the mass downgrades of euro zone members on Friday, showed little reaction to the latest blow — which had been expected — and Japan, a major buyer of EFSF bonds, said they remained an “attractive” investment.
A growing number of experts, including a Standard & Poor’s official, warned that a Greek default was on the cards, after Greece’s talks with creditors broke down on Friday.
Greece was under growing pressure to secure a last-ditch agreement with its private creditors to accept voluntary losses on their holdings of Greek bonds.
Athens risks going bankrupt when 14.5 billion euros of bond redemptions fall due in late March. Without a private sector bond swap involving a voluntary writedown, a 130 billion euro second international bailout for Greece could fall apart.
The talks with creditor banks broke down because of different views on what interest rate is acceptable, the head of the group leading private sector talks said.
Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Financial, said the banks were “very surprised” at the stance taken by some officials representing both governments and multilateral institutions, without naming them.
The EFSF was set up by the 17 governments that share the European single currency in May 2010 and has so far been used to provide emergency loans to Ireland and Portugal. It is also expected to contribute to a second bailout of Greece.
The fund has an effective lending capacity of 440 billion euros, which depends on guarantees, mainly from the euro zone’s AAA countries, only four of which now remain: Germany, Luxembourg, Finland and the Netherlands.
LENDING CAPACITY UNAFFECTED
In a statement, the EFSF said the downgrade would not affect its lending capacity, and emphasized that its short-term rating remained at S&P’s top level.
“The downgrade to ‘AA+’ by only one credit agency will not reduce EFSF’s lending capacity of 440 billion euros,” said the fund’s chief executive, Klaus Regling.
“EFSF has sufficient means to fulfill its commitments under current and potential future adjustment programs until the ESM becomes operational in July 2012,” he added.
The ESM — the European Stability Mechanism — is a permanent rescue fund that is expected to have an effective capacity of 500 billion euros, based on paid-in capital of 80 billion euros and callable capital of 620 billion euros.
French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said there was no need to shore up the EFSF despite the S&P rating downgrade.
“The EFSF has kept intact its ability to lend, with enough means and guarantees to fulfill the full range of its present and future commitments,” he said in a statement. “There is therefore no need to act on the EFSF at the moment.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert told reporters: “The government has no reason to believe that the volume of guarantees that the EFSF has now should not be sufficient to fulfill its current obligations.
“We should not forget that it has been decided to significantly move forward the ESM and to have it in place in mid-2012, one year earlier than planned.”
There was also support from Japan, with Finance Minister Jun Azumi saying Tokyo’s trust in EFSF bonds, in which it has so far invested 21 billion euros, had not been shaken.
“Japan has bought them by certain amounts and our stance will not immediately change just because of the downgrade,” Azumi told reporters after a cabinet meeting.
The euro hovered just above a 17-month trough against the dollar early in Asia on Tuesday, but reaction to the S&P downgrade was muted. Trading overnight was subdued as U.S. markets were shut for the Martin Luther King holiday.
The head of Austria’s debt office told Reuters the loss of Vienna’s AAA status had also been priced into the market already, and Austria was able to sell treasury bills on Monday at rates very close to zero.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy brushed off the historic loss of Paris’ top credit rating for the first time since 1975, a blow to his campaign for re-election in May, saying France’s policy would not be dictated by rating agencies.
Contrasting S&P’s move with a statement by rival watchdog Moody’s, which still has France on an Aaa rating, he said: “My deep belief is that it changes nothing. We must reduce the deficit, we must reduce our spending and we must improve the competitiveness of our economy to return to a path of growth.”
LOSERS TO PAY?
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, whose debt-laden country was downgraded by two notches along with Spain, called last week during a visit to Berlin for the EFSF to be increased to ward off attacks on his country’s bonds.
But a senior politician in Merkel’s conservative CDU party, Michael Meister, said it was the downgraded countries that should increase their guarantees for the fund.
“Germany was not downgraded so our contribution should not be changed. Countries that were affected must contribute more to the guarantees,” Meister told Reuters.
Sources familiar with Greece’s talks with its private creditors said EU paymaster Germany was pressing for new bonds to be given to banks in the planned swap to carry a low coupon of less than four percent that would increase the banks’ effective losses to 75 percent.
The IMF was also weighing on the talks by warning that the Greek economy and the euro zone’s economic outlook have worsened since the bailout package was agreed in October, raising Athens’ funding needs to make its debt sustainable by 2020, they said.
Greece put a brave face on the standoff. “There is a little pause in these discussions,” Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos told CNBC television. “But I am confident they will continue and we will reach an agreement that is mutually acceptable in time.”
(Additional reporting by Lefteris Papadimos in Athens, Steve Slater and Richard Hubbard in London, Jan Strupczewski in Brussels and Fiona Ortiz in Madrid; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Tim Pearce and Alex Richardson)
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JPMorgan kicks off bank earnings season with 23% drop in profit

Reporting from Los Angeles and New York—
JPMorgan Chase & Co. kicked off bank earnings season with a 23% decline in profit and sagging revenue that investors saw as an ominous precedent for other big financial companies that report results next week.
An increase in consumer credit card usage and an uptick in business lending couldn’t offset weaknesses elsewhere at JPMorgan, Friday’s report showed. Investment banking, where revenue fell 30%, was particularly hard hit.
The report landed at a rocky time for markets, with global uncertainties including the European debt crisis restraining major corporate expansions and takeovers. Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of eight Eurozone countries Friday, stripping France and Austria of their prized AAA ratings.
Closer to home, major players in the mortgage business, like JPMorgan, continue to struggle with mountains of defaulted loans, foreclosed properties and demands that they repurchase flawed mortgages from government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as private investors.
Despite recent increases in commercial lending, JPMorgan officials say loan demand from solid businesses is spotty, leaving them with deposits overflowing — and open to accusations that they are too tightfisted after having been bailed out by the government. JPMorgan’s deposits rose 21% over the last year to $1.13 trillion.
“Companies are flush with cash and their cash balances are growing,” JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said during a call with bank analysts.
JPMorgan, the nation’s biggest bank, reported net income of $3.7 billion, or 90 cents a share, for the fourth quarter of 2011, down from $4.8 billion, or $1.12, a year earlier.
The profit was about as expected on Wall Street. But the bank’s quarterly revenue fell to $21.5 billion from $26.1 billion a year earlier, coming in well below analysts’ consensus forecast of $23 billion.
JPMorgan shares fell 93 cents, or 2.5%, to $35.92.
Since JPMorgan is the largest bank as measured by assets, and regarded as one of the best managed banks, investors reassessed their holdings across the board. Many banks stocks fell 4% in early trading. At the end of the day, Morgan Stanley declined 3.2% to $16.63, Bank of America was down 2.7% at $6.61, Citigroup fell 2.7% to $30.74 and Goldman Sachs slid 2.2% to $98.96.
An exception to the trend was Wells Fargo & Co., which closed the day unchanged at $29.61.
In a reversal of the situation immediately after the financial crisis, investors are betting on stronger showings from banks like Wells Fargo that have focused more on consumers than on trading.
The San Francisco bank, the largest bank as measured by stock market value, has seen its year-over-year earnings rise steadily. Analysts predicted that it would show a quarterly profit of $3.6 billion when it releases its results Tuesday, up from $3.4 billion a year earlier but down from $4 billion in the third quarter.
Bank of America Corp., which is in the middle of a major campaign to scale back risks and raise capital at the behest of regulators, was expected to reverse a loss of $1.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010 and report a profit of more than $2 billion Thursday.
Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts said JPMorgan’s loan loss and mortgage buyback numbers, while still high, had improved enough to be a positive sign for Bank of America. BofA shares have tanked 58% since last year as the Charlotte, N.C., bank has been hammered by tens of billions of dollars in losses from its 2008 acquisition of Calabasas home lender Countrywide Financial Corp.
Analysts have generally been growing more pessimistic about financial firms with big Wall Street trading operations, all of which will report their financial results in the next few weeks. New regulations and global financial turmoil have darkened the prospects for securities firms, making them one of the worst performing sectors on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index over the last year.
“We expect this quarter will be characterized more by limited activity and leverage across institutional investors and across corporations given the continued uncertainty in Europe and possible spillover effects in the U.S,” analysts at Keefe Bruyette & Woods wrote this week in a note to clients.
Last quarter, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. reported a loss for the first time since the financial crisis. Although Goldman is likely to bounce back to profit when it announces its results Wednesday, it is not expected to show any signs of growth.
Glenn Schorr, a bank analyst at Nomura Securities, said in a report that recent results “have investors wondering if GS has lost its ‘mojo.’”
scott.reckard@latimes.com
nathaniel.popper@latimes.com