Thursday 9 June 2011

Who is going to be bulldozed over? Sorry I meant roll over

The latest from the Greek mill:

International side:

There was an unscheduled Eurogroup videoconference yesterday.
Merkel met Obama and they seemed to ok extending the bailout.
The ECB may soften their opposition against the rollover of the Greek debt if private investors (i.e. Banks and Funds) agree to participate and the rating agencies approve.
The IMF would only release the 5th installment to Greece if Europe agrees on extending the plan.

Greek Side:

The Greek cabinet is meeting to today to approve the outline of the Medium Term Plan. This is NOT the full monty. The cabinet would approve a 2 page document only. The bill containing the measures (selling of assets etc) would appear in roughly 10 days and then we would see how harsh the opposition is. Lets not forget that both the 5th installment and Bailout II is contingent on Greece passing the MTP. A further complication may be the people's opposition to passing the bill. according to press reports, they are planning to block the entrances to the parliament to keep the MP from entering and voting.

Latest plan is to “convince” bond holders of Greek debt to rollover their holdings for another 7y and a further 90-100bln to cover Greece till 2015. Originally, the ECB opposed this idea and the rating agencies signaled that it would be a credit event and thus trigger the CDS. Current thinking is to replace the maturing Greek bonds with bonds that have some sort of enhancements in order to bypass the objections from the rating agencies. This may include:
  1. Higher coupon
  2. Introduction of CAC (Collective Action Clauses)
  3. New bonds under International law and not Greek law
  4. Credit enhancements or guarantees. (this would be a credit event for sure)
The first three (1) to (3) may escape the full default status although they rating agencies may chose to rate this as “Selective default” (A bit like a zombie, half dead half alive) which is one step higher than default (Full dead). The last one (4) is de-facto a credit event as it would subordinate the rest of the bond holders.

But who are the Private Bondholders that need to be rolled over (convinced). Some of them (Credit Agricole and SocGen came out in favour)

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