Following on from John McHale’s post over the weekend, here‘s an expanded version of the document I sent to John. There seems to be some confusion out there about the extent of Irish bank bond debt, about the various types and about how much is covered by the September 2008 guarantee. The document draws together the relevant information on maturity of bank debt from the annual reports of Anglo, AIB, BoI, INBS and Irish Life and Permanent.
This information isn’t completely timely or perfect: A full Bloomberg trawl is perhaps the best way to do this. Importantly, none of the banks list September 2010, the end of the guarantee, as a maturity date in their tables. Instead, they list debt maturing up to the end of this year. It is well known, though, that the vast majority of the debt of Irish banks matures prior to the fourth quarter. An advantage of these calculations is that they come from publicly available sources and we can be clear about what it is we’re discussing.
The bottom line. By my calculations based on the annual reports showing the state of play at the end of last year—and feel free to correct me if I’ve got this wrong—these five banks had €71.7 billion in bonds due by December of this year with only €0.7 billion of this being subordinated. They then had a further €51.8 billion due after 2010, €14.4 billion of which are subordinated.
The very significant figure for bonds due this year shows that conjectures that the need to roll over bank debt could lead to a serious problem for the Irish government are essentially correct. Whether this scenario will actually happen, we don’t know, but one should be careful to dismiss those who say it could.
Update: The document had tables splitting debt securities into subordinated and senior debt. Because the total includes commercial paper and certificate of deposits, this might cause some confusion. I’ve edited the document to list the split as subordinated and other.