Author: Karl Whelan

Anglo’s January 31st Bond

There have been some comments on this blog this morning on the popular subject of bank bonds.

Let me point out some facts and then some questions for debate.

The facts:  On Monday, January 31st, Anglo Irish Bank are going to pay out on a maturing bond worth €750 million. (For reference, the total cut in this year’s welfare budget will be €873 million.) The investors who purchased this bond invested their money with Anglo on the 17th of January 2006. The bond is senior unsecured debt and is not covered by a state guarantee.

The questions: Should the government have passed legislation this month to allow the Minister for Finance to intervene so that the bank did not pay this bond back? And if so, should the next government pass such a bill in relation to the remaining €4 billion or so in outstanding unguaranteed bonds owed by Anglo and INBS?

In answering the question, it’s worth noting that the logic of the section of the recent Credit Institutions (Stabilisation) Bill relating to subordinated debt suggests that a government can change the terms and conditions of bonds to apply haircuts if the bank owes its continued existence to significant amounts of public money being injected.

It is unclear whether this power can simply be extended to senior bonds but it seems to me that it can. Another issue is whether such changes in terms and conditions can legally work to allow a bank to distinguish between different types of unsecured creditors that start out with equal claims, by haircutting bond holders but not deposits. Mechanically, of course, one could achieve the same outcome by haircutting both senior bonds and depositors and then compensating depositors via a separate piece of legislation, but this would be more complicated.

The other issue is the implications of a default on a senior bond for the Irish and European banking sectors. My belief is that how this plays depends on what investors believe is the precedent being set. If the precedent is that investors can lose out if they place their money with banks with flawed business models, who engaged in shady business practices and then become grossly insolvent—then surely this is a precedent that must form part of new proposals for dealing with failed institutions?

On the other hand, one could argue that at such a sensitive time for the Irish banking sector, defaults of this type would send the wrong message and worsen an already extremely serious liquidity problem. This is the argument put forward by our new best friend, Mr. Bini-Smaghi.

I’m open to considering all sides of this argument. On balance, however, I’m inclined to the position that it is in the interests of both Irish citizens and those in the wider EU to set a precedent with the Anglo and INBS bonds that there need to be limits on how much support European taxpayers will provide to insolvent banks.

Further Reductions in IMF Rate Are Likely

A reader has written to me about an important item missing from my briefing paper on the IMF-EU loans. I noted in the report that the amount of money that Ireland can borrow at cheap rates is three times our IMF quota and that this quota was about to increase. However, I did not mention that a much larger increase in Ireland’s quota is likely to occur over the next year or so.

On November 5th, the IMF concluded its 14th General Review of Quotas with the Executive Board recommending that the Fund’s Board of Governors adopt the proposed quotas. The proposals include a doubling of the total amount of quotas and review of each county’s share of the total. Ireland’s share is proposed to increase further from 0.528% to 0.724%). This means that Ireland’s IMF quota will increase to around SDR 3.45 billion, which at current exchange rates would translate to a quota for almost €4 billion.

If implemented, these proposals would allow Ireland to borrow almost €12 billion at IMF’s low interest rate (currently 1.38%) with the remaining €10.5 billion at the higher rate (3.38% for the first three years, 4.38% thereafter). Over a seven and a half year period, this would translate into a loan that had an average margin over the variable SDR base rate of 228 basis points, down from the 326 basis point margin associated with the IMF lending terms that prevailed at the time the bailout deal was increased.

To come into effect, the proposals must be approved by 85% of the IMF’s voting share and 113 member countries. It’s unclear how long this will take but it may take a year or so.

I think this adjustment of the IMF lending terms is an important point to keep in mind when considering the lending terms on the EU loans. The EU lending authorities have been keen to point out that, once compared in the appropriate fashion, their loans can be viewed as having equivalent cost to the loan that the IMF offered the Irish government in November. This is true. However, when compared against the terms that the IMF is going to offer Ireland in the near future, the European loans are a good deal more expensive.

Oireachtas Appearance on EU-IMF Interest Rates

I appeared today before the Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs to discuss the interest rates on the EU-IMF loans. I provided the committee with a briefing paper (available here) and a short presentation (available here). I will edit this post later to include the transcript of my opening statement and the questions and answer session when these materials are posted on the Oireachtas website.

There’s a lot of material in the briefing note and I’m not going to repeat it here. One point I would briefly point to, however, is that the note discusses how recent movements in market interest rates and the pricing of EFSM’s initial bond issue on January 5th (EU Commission press release here) meant that, by my estimates, the cost of funding from the EFSF and EFSM would be 40 basis points higher than had been estimated in the December note released by the NTMA.

These materials were prepared prior to today’s €5 billion bond auction the EFSF. Press stories have been very positive about how this bond auction went (e.g. here and here). However, the material I prepared discussed the pricing of the EFSM bond yield relative to swap rates. The January 5th bond was priced at mid-swaps +12 basis points while this bond mid-swaps +6 basis points, so the interest rate on today’s bond would not change my judgment on this issue by much.

Update: As promised here‘s the transcript of my appearance

For How Long Does EU-IMF Financing Fund the State?

Over the past week, there have been repeated references during the Fianna Fail heave\confidence vote to the government’s achievement in securing funding for the state for a number of years.

The plan was originally presented as funding the state for three years. However, yesterday on Morning Ireland, Brian Cowen claimed that “funding for the state for the next four years had been organised” while on the Vincent Browne show on Monday night, junior minister Tony Killeen swung for the stars and claimed that we had secured “financing for the state for the next ten years or so”. (15.40 in).

Given the hyperbole\confusion on this matter, I thought it might be worth pointing out a few figures that suggest that the maximum length of time that the deal allows the state to stay out of the bond market is three years and that a more realistic assessment would suggest about two and a half years.

Continue reading “For How Long Does EU-IMF Financing Fund the State?”

Cowen and Advice Relating to the Guarantee

As Fianna Fail deputies and the media debate the performance of Brian Cowen as Taoiseach over the next few days, the question of the September 2008 guarantee will come up time and again. The Taoiseach has defended himself strongly against accusations that any relationships he had with bankers led to his government’s decision to offer a near-blanket guarantee to the liabilities of the Irish banks. He has repeatedly argued that this decision was taken in the national interest.

This still leaves open the question of why it was considered in the national interest to offer such an extensive guarantee. On this subject, Mister Cowen has tended to answer that they took this decision based on the best advice available. The next few days would be a good time to provide evidence for this statement. As it stands, there is a lot of evidence that plenty of contrary advice was given. For example, as has been noted here on a number of occasions, the government’s expensively-hired outside advisers, Merrill Lynch, were not enthusiastic about such a guarantee.

In relation to the Department of Finance’s policy advice on this issue, a useful example of the Department’s stance is document 36 from the PAC collection. The document is a slide presentation from February 2008 titled “Overview of Financial Stability Resolution Issues”.  Page 11 states in bold:

As a matter of public policy to protect the interests of taxpayers any requirement to provide open-ended/legally binding State guarantees which would expose the Exchequer to the risk of very significant costs are not regarded as part of the toolkit for successful crisis management and resolution.

In bold and with “not” underlined. It certainly seems as though the Department officials were on the record as being against the form of guarantee provided. Evidence on who exactly proposed the form of guarantee that was provided would be welcome.

I also think it’s worth keeping in mind when government politicians condemn those who opposed the guarantee (i.e. the Labour Party) as having been irresponsible, as Peter Power did on the The Week in Politics last night, that this opposition was shared by the government’s own advisers.