Banking Follies In The Eurozone

Edward Hugh has a brilliant analysis of recent events in the eurozone and especially how banks are leveraging the liquidity provided by the ECB to "cleanse" their balance sheet of bad assets and essentially exchanging these for freshly minted euro deposits at the ECB. I think we should be very clear what is going on here; this is essentially a covert recapitalisation of the European banking system and the ECB is in every sense of the word acting as a lender of last resort. 

Here is the relevant part;

Another area where the transfer of liquidity doesn't show up as a change in aggregate excess liquidity is when banks offload their wholesale liabilities to other EuroArea banks and refund via the ECB. Here again, if they do it smartly, they can even earn a bit of "quasi carry" in the process, by buying back their debt at well below face value from those who are anxious to exit the periphery, and then refinancing at the ECB without writing down the underlying asset. This could be termed a liability "write down", and again the procedure earns the bank a nice bit of income which can subsequently be used to help the recapitalisation process.

Take the Portuguese Bank BPI (the country's fourth largest), which is making public tender offers to buy back its debt. If all concerned tender their bonds to BPI, BPI will pay something short of  €1.5bn cash to investors. Mortgages which were previously sitting in one of their SPVs will return to their balance sheet, and ECB money will now be on the other side financing them allowing significant profits (and capital) to be reported. In this particular tender the smallest discount is 35% and the largest is 65%. Investors may initially balk at the offer, since they will nurse a heavy loss (equal, naturally, to BPI´s profit) but ultimately they will probably be only too happy to be able to walk away from Portugal, and  with some cash in their pocket to boot.

Iberian banks were already aware of  the benefits of this kind of restructuring during the 2009-2010 liquidity wave, and went about quietly repurchasing their bonds (bank capital, securitizations, senior bonds) on a selective and private basis at a discount. Much of their reported profits in those years in fact came from either the ECB carry trade or this kind of  transaction.  So when we read that another Portuguese bank – Banco Espirito Santo – has just had €1 billion of debt guaranteed by the Portuguese state (a sovereign which can't itself go to the markets) it isn't hard to imagine that the process going on in the background is something similar to that seen in the BPI case, and that the debt is being guaranteed so it can  go over to the ECB to be posted as collateral.

The National Bank of Greece has been doing something similar.