ECB sætter markant øget pres på Grækenland

Analyse fra BNP Paribas

This week saw two key headlines on Greece. The first was a new restructuring plan by the Greek Finance Minister, Mr. Varoufakis, stating that: a) Greek official loans be exchanged in a debt swap for bonds whose returns will depend on Greek growth; and b) Greek bonds held by the ECB to be exchanged into perpetuals. While the perpetual bond swap is a non-starter, as that would mean a default rating from the rating agencies, the growth based debt swap interested the markets and spreads swung tighter on the back of that news as the probability of a reconciliation was deemed to be higher. While Mr. Tsipras and Mr. Varoufakis were trying to get support from various European politicians we had the second headline from the ECB. The ECB, on Wednesday night, heaped pressure on the new Greek government by restricting access to its direct liquidity lines, citing concerns about the country’s commitment to existing bailout pledges. “The ECB today decided to lift the waiver affecting marketable debt instruments issued or fully guaranteed by the Hellenic Republic,” the ECB said on Wednesday. “The Governing Council’s decision is based on the fact that it is currently not possible to assume a successful conclusion of the program review and is in line with existing Eurosystem rules.” The ECB had not publicly signalled that it would take such action so soon. On 8 January, the central bank said it would continue the waiver on the assumption that Greece would conclude a review of its current bailout programme, which expires 28 February, and negotiate another one. So this comes as a surprise and is evidence of ECB strong arm tactics to potentially achieve two aims: a) the negotiations could last too long between Greece and various European governments and the ECB is trying to compress the timeline, potentially to try to keep it within 28 February; and b) this move reduces the likelihood of the ECB ending up with more Greek debt in an environment where the chances of a haircut on the official sector holdings are higher than before. This puts significant pressure on the Greek government as Greek banks financing becomes more expensive. In the absence of access to the ECB facilities, Greek banks would have to rely on the Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) for funding which is a lot more expensive. ELA is priced at an annual interest rate of 1.55% compared with the current ECB refinancing rate of 0.05%. Greek banks have €38bn of EFSF bonds and c.€50bn of non-government credit claims eligible to ELA funding and their current use of Eurosystem funding has sharply increased from €45bn in December to more than €80bn, mobilising the EFSF bonds (€38bn), sovereign bonds like GGBs/T-bills (c. €10bn) and government-guaranteed bank bonds (€40bn).