Creditors

To all those who stayed up until 6 am local time yesterday to hear Europe announce that the Greek deal is done, Europe is fixed, and that a pot of gold was found at the end of the rainbow, our condolences. Sorry, no isn't. Following up on our earlier post about the potential of UK-law bondholders to once again scuttle the deal, here comes none other than the IIF's Charles Dallara who basically says that the fate of Greece, the Euro, and the Eurozone, are in the hands of Greek creditors as we have been cautioning all along. And after all why on earth would hedge funds who just lost over 70% of their recoveries bear a grudge whatsoever...

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Greek threshold for "successful" CAC passage is now expected to be just 66%, far below the 95% discussed yesterday. Says the WSJ: "The Greek government is aiming for a minimum participation of least two-thirds of bond holders in a planned debt exchange, a finance ministry official said Tuesday, with a formal offer on the exchange expected to take place by the end of this week. The deal, which aims to erase some EUR107 billion from Greece's debt burden, is part and parcel of a related EUR130 billion loan deal agreed to by euro-zone finance ministers in the early hours of Tuesday." As was extensively explained in our subordination piece from January, this is the number of bondholders that have to agree to the Collective Action Clause, which if passed successfully, would avoid a CDS trigger as it would be then deemed voluntary by ISDA who are more than happy to avoid any type of contagion causes by CDS triggers - they are after all a banker-owned organization. We ignore how a 66% participation rate is anything but a majority, let alone supposedly consensual. There is a bigger issue. And unfortunately by the Greek's actions, it shows they are in process of abrogating even more contractual rights in the form of foreign (UK-Law) covenant agreements. Either that, or the country is about to pay par to all UK-law bonds, both outcomes that threaten to put the entire second bailout in jeopardy.

We have lived through a long period of financial management, in which failing financial institutions have been propped up by emergency intervention (applied somewhat selectively). Defaults have not been permitted. The result has been a tremendous build-up of paper ripe for burning. Had the fires of default been allowed to burn freely in the past we may well have healthier financial institutions. Instead we find our banks loaded up with all kinds of flammable paper products; their basements stuffed with barrels of black powder. Trails of black powder run from bank to bank, and it's raining matches.

That didn't take long. From Athens News: "Greece's two biggest labor unions, GSEE and ADEDY, on Tuesday announced plans for a protest rally on Syntagma Square on Wednesday. Starting at 4 p.m., the protest march is scheduled to coincide with a vote in Parliament on an emergency bill aimed at slashing state spending further through cuts to pensions and salaries, to which Greece is bound by its most recent bailout agreement." Parliaments is planning on further spending cuts? To what? Zero? Negative? And one can bet their bottom dollar, the tax collectors, already urged to increase their efficiency by 200%, will be present, and certainly not tripling their work output while peacefully consuming lungfulls of tear gas.

The day dawns with a deal for Greece that is full of smoke and mirrors; lies and deceptions. It is a deal pretty much as expected and, as I have said before, now the realities are going to be confronted. Europe has spun the agreement and the Euro has rallied some and the S&P futures are up but the next few weeks, I am afraid, will hold some serious disappointments. The page turns today because now we are about to confront not what is told to us but the actuality of what has been presented to us and just what will happen as a result.

Heading into the North American open, equities are trading lower with the benchmark EU volatility index up 1.6%, with financials underperforming on concerns that the latest Greek bailout deal will need to be revised yet again. Officials said that the deal will require Greece’s private creditors to take a deeper write-down on the face value of their EUR 200bln in holdings than first agreed. The haircut on the face value of privately held Greek debt will now be over 53%. As a result of the measures adopted, the creditors now assume that Greece’s gross debt will fall to just over 120% of GDP by 2020, from around 164% currently, according to the officials. However as noted by analysts at the Troika in their latest debt sustainability report - “…there are notable risks. Given the high prospective level and share of senior debt, the prospects for Greece to be able to return to the market in the years following the end of the new program are uncertain and require more analysis”. Still, Bunds are down and a touch steeper in 2/10s under moderately light volume, while bond yield spreads around Europe are tighter.

Depending on what yield you apply to the new Greek bonds, then the package is worth 21.5% to 26.25%. Since bonds are trading with accrued and accrued will be paid in 6 months, the real question comes down to what you believe is the value of these new bonds. If there is an amortization schedule, that would change the valuation positively... We still haven’t seen retroactive CAC clauses implemented, but assuming that they are, I’m not sure why the Troika would accept a 95% rate and not trigger, but it seems worth taking the risk. The ECB swap may be illegal. The retroactive CAC may be illegal. The Troika seems like it wants to pretend there is no default if at all possible, in spite of the write-down of more than 50% of the debt.

While we await for Thomas Stolper to issue his latest flip flop and to go long the EURUSD again ("tactically", not "strategically"), here is Francesco Garzarelli's take on the Greek bailout.Here is the biggest issue: "Increased likelihood of CDS: Moreover, higher losses inflicted on the private sector, involving the likely activation of CACs and the triggering of CDS, represent sources of near-term volatility." Bingo. Now as we pointed out in the previous post, a "successful" and completely undefined PSI program is a key precondition to the program. However, with bondholders now certain to throw up, and the requisite 75% (forget 95%) acceptance threshold unlike to be reached, will the use of Collective Action Clauses, and thus a CDS trigger constitute a PSI failure, and thus deal breach? In other words, since we now know that the March 20 bond payment will be part of the PSI, is last night's farce merely a way to avoid giving Greece a bridge loan, and putting its fate in the hands of creditors, which as we noted back in January is a lose-lose strategy?

Update 3: Conference begins now

Update 2: At this point the conference, if at all, will be held at 3:30 am CET. Probably would be better to just scrap it all, put a fork in Greece and go home. The second the 10 page Greek "sustainability" report hits the public it's lights out.

Update: 23:00 CET has come and gone. Next stop: midnight. As a reminder, the October 2011 official second Greek bailout announcement was delayed until 4 am.

According to a just released update on the website of the European Council, the much anticipated press conference "to end all press conferences" will take place at 23:00 CET, or 5 pm Eastern. What will then likely happen is another delay until midnight, then later, then finally when Europe is sleeping a few finance ministers will say that the Deal is virtually done, the terms of the PSI are agreed upon (except that "some" creditors, those who have a blocking stake, will vote no and force the use of CACs and thus trigger a default before March 20) with the exception of a few minor outstanding items, such as whose debt is cut to bring total Debt/GDP to 120% by 2020, which they hope to get resolved shortly. And so this latest and greatest meeting will come and go, and anyone who shorted the Belgian caterers will be broke when the market opens up tomorrow, when Belgian catering ETFs all go limit up.

A massive 150bn euro bill exclusively reserved for the EU-IMF funding of the "official" (OSI) and the private (PSI) sector participations in the Greek writedown on Greek debt may be the key factor behind the ongoing delays in the eurozone finance ministers' approval of a second bailout for Greece. This factor remains concealed behind media hysteria about the supposed failure of Athens to comply with a brutal austerity diktat by the EU-IMF-ECB 'troika'....The question is how will the Eurogroup approve these PSI participation costs that far exceed the supposed gain from the 100bn euro "haircut" but also leave nothing to cover Greece's debt servicing obligations for 2012-2014 of at least another 70bn euros to say nothing of possible budget deficits due to the collapse of public revenues in the fifth consecutive year of a Greek depression. All the histrionics about forcing Greece to set up a separate “escrow account that would give legal priority to debt and interest payments over paying for government expenses”, is nothing but a smokescreen for piling massive sums of fresh public debt on Greece's shoulders without lending a single penny to make up for the economic catastrophe meted out on the country.

The first details of the Greek bond deal are leaking out via Reuters, and we now learn the reason for the Greek bond sell off in recent days:

• UNDER GREEK DEBT SWAP, PRIVATE SECTOR WILL GET 3% COUPON ON BONDS FROM 2012-20, 3.75% COUPON FROM 2021 ONWARDS [2021... LOL]
• PRIVATE SECTOR WILL ALSO GET A GDP-LINKED ADDITIONAL PAYMENT, CAPPED AT 1 PCT OF THE OUTSTANDING AMOUNT OF NEW BONDS [If it appears that nobody gives a rat's ass about this bullet point, it's because it's true]
• GREEK BANK RECAPITALISATION NEEDS MAY NOW BE AS MUCH AS 50 BLN EUROS-DEBT SUSTAINABILITY ANALYSIS

Which in turn explains the sell off in pre-petition Greek junior triple subordinated bonds (i.e., those held by private unconnected investors, which are subordinated to the Troika's bailout loans, to the ECB's SMP purchases, to the Public Sector bonds and to UK-law bonds in that order). With the EFSF Bill "sweetener" amounting to about 15 cents (and likely less), the fact that bondholders will receive a 3% cash coupon, a cash on cash return based on Greek bonds of 2015 trading at just 20.7 cents on the euro, indicates that investors are expecting to collect 1 cash coupon payment, and at absolute best 2, before redefault, as buying a 2015 bond now at 20.7 of par, yields a full cash return of 21 (15+3+3), thus the third coupon payment is assured not to come. And since there is a substantial upside risk premium kicker to bond buyers, in reality the investing market is saying that Greece will last at best about a year following the debt exchange (if it ever even happens) before the country redefaults.

Run your on Greek default scenario right here. An online sovereign default calculator, of sorts...

Update: And finally for some reality from Dutch fin min De Jager: "We Cannot Approve Second Programme For Greece Until Greece Has Met All Its Obligation"... And now we know who Germany's "+1" will be when Greece becomes Southern Goldman Bavaria: "De Jager Says He’s in Favor of a Permanent Troika in Athens"

We would love to share some witty comments and jovial banter on this latest set of soundbites by Europe's effete bureaucrati on occasion of the latest and greatest Greek bailout, however having already done so on at least 10 times in the past, we have run out of things to say in this particular context and frankly we are bored with this topic. Which is precisely the Eurogroup's intention. Presenting "soundbites du jour, Greece edition N+1".

Let's put things back into perspective. Europe is lending money to Greece, which according to latest rumors will at least for the time being be in the form of the dreaded Escrow Account, which in turn means that the only recipients of bailout cash will be Greek creditors, whose claims will be senior to that of the government. In other words, it will be up to Greece, and specifically its own tax "collectors" to provide the actual funding needed to run the country as bailout or not bailout, Greek mandatory (forget discretionary) expenditures will not see one penny from Europe. As a reminder, the country is already €1 billion behind schedule in revenue collections which are down 7% Y/Y compared to an expectation of 9% rise. As a further reminder, the one defining characteristic of Greek tax collectors is that they are prone to striking. Virtually all the time. And that is assuming they even have the ink to print the required tax forms. Which last year they did not. So under what realistic assumptions are Greek tax collectors laboring in the current tax year? Why, nothing short of them having to be not 100%, but 200% more efficient. From Kathimerini: "Greece’s tax collectors were told over the weekend that they would have to do a much better job this year at gathering overdue taxes. How much better? Almost 200 percent." And this, unfortunately, is where the Greek bailout comes to a screeching halt, because while it is no secret that Greek "bailouts" do nothing for the country, but merely enforce ever more stringent austerity to mask the fact that all the cash is simply going from one banker pocket to another, it is the pandemic corruption embedded in generations of behavior that is at the root of all Greek evil. And there is no eradicating that. Now tomorrow, and not by 2020.

For several weeks now we have been warning that while the conventional wisdom is that Europe will never let Greece slide into default, Germany has been quietly preparing for just that. This culminated on Friday when the schism between Merkel, who is of the persuasion that Greece should remain in the Eurozone, and her Finmin, Wolfgang "Dr. Strangle Schauble" Schauble, who isn't, made Goldman Sachs itself observe that there is: "Growing dissent between Chancellor Merkel and finance minister Schäuble regarding Greece." We now learn, courtesy of the Telegraph's Bruno Waterfield, that Germany is far deeper in Greece insolvency preparations than conventional wisdom thought possible (if not Zero Hedge, where we have been actively warning for over two weeks that Germany is perfectly eager and ready to roll the dice on a Greek default). Yet it is not only Germany that is getting ready for the inevitable. So is Greece.