"Back on February 17, the European Central Bank sprinkled its magical pixie dust on its Greek sovereign bonds, with the effect that they effectively ended up exempt from the restructuring and haircut being inflicted on everybody else. I wasn’t very excited about this development at the time:
First, there’s a formal question which has been put to ISDA’s Determinations Committee, asking whether the ECB magical pixie dust, combined with the passage of the Greek law to allow the haircut, doesn’t in itself constitute a credit event under ISDA rules.
The question takes the form of a single 179-word sentence, which some lawyer somewhere probably thinks is very clever. But here’s the idea: the two events together have effectively cleaved the stock of Greek bonds into two parts, with one part (the bonds owned by the ECB) being effectively senior to the other part (the bonds owned by everybody else). This is known as Subordination, and Subordination is a credit event under ISDA rules.
Now there’s no doubt that the private sector’s Greek bonds are de facto subordinate to the ECB’s Greek bonds now, and that they weren’t subordinate a couple of weeks ago. But so far there’s nothing de jure about this subordination — there’s no intrinsic reason why bonds with CACs, for instance, should be subordinate to bonds without CACs. So my guess is that this request is going to go nowhere, and/or get overtaken by events.
But now there’s news that another European institution has managed to get its hands on the ECB’s magical pixie dust.
at http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/28/greeces-default-gets-messier/
On a conceptual level, it makes sense that the Troika — of which the ECB is a third — might be granted immunity from haircuts, in return for providing new money to Greece. On a legal and practical level, however, this is ugly — and you can be quite sure that it’s only going to get uglier from here on in.Today, we’re beginning to get a hint of the messiness that this decision caused.
First, there’s a formal question which has been put to ISDA’s Determinations Committee, asking whether the ECB magical pixie dust, combined with the passage of the Greek law to allow the haircut, doesn’t in itself constitute a credit event under ISDA rules.
The question takes the form of a single 179-word sentence, which some lawyer somewhere probably thinks is very clever. But here’s the idea: the two events together have effectively cleaved the stock of Greek bonds into two parts, with one part (the bonds owned by the ECB) being effectively senior to the other part (the bonds owned by everybody else). This is known as Subordination, and Subordination is a credit event under ISDA rules.
Now there’s no doubt that the private sector’s Greek bonds are de facto subordinate to the ECB’s Greek bonds now, and that they weren’t subordinate a couple of weeks ago. But so far there’s nothing de jure about this subordination — there’s no intrinsic reason why bonds with CACs, for instance, should be subordinate to bonds without CACs. So my guess is that this request is going to go nowhere, and/or get overtaken by events.
But now there’s news that another European institution has managed to get its hands on the ECB’s magical pixie dust.
The European Investment Bank, owned by the 27-member bloc, is getting exemptions from Greek debt writedowns in the same way as the euro area’s central bank, according to two regional officials familiar with the matter.While the ECB exemption was understandable, on the grounds that the ECB was part of the Troika and the Troika is putting up new money here, an EIB exemption is less so. The EIB is not putting money into this latest Greece bailout. Indeed, it represents countries like the UK which are quite explicitly removing themselves from any such thing..."
The European Central Bank negotiated a deal to avoid the 53.5 percent loss on principal that’s costing private investors as much as 106 billion euros ($143 billion). The EIB, which unlike its Frankfurt-based counterpart represents the entire European Union, also owns Greece’s debt and is sidestepping the so-called haircut in the same way, said the officials, who declined to be identified because the plan isn’t public.
at http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/28/greeces-default-gets-messier/
