The Greek CDS situation is sort of puzzling, but it’s possible, and popular, to overstate its puzzlingness. We have probably been guilty of doing so in the past. In brief: if you hold Greek bonds, you sort of have to hand them over and get back other, shinier Greek bonds with half the face value. How sort of? The text of the statement is “we invite Greece, private investors and all parties concerned to develop a voluntary bond exchange with a nominal discount of 50% on notional Greek debt held by private investors,” which is an attractive invitation although it does not exactly indicate that the party is occurring right now. But that sentence is code; it was negotiated by the banks’ trade group and is a sort of quid pro quo for bank recaps and general regulatory approval so you’d expect most – not necessarily all – of the banks to be onside. The fact that the statement was released suggests that everyone thinks there are soft commitments to exchange from the banks holding the large majority of Greece’s debt, though they’ve thought that before.
If everyone who holds Greek bonds does the exchange, then Greece never defaults. They just did a voluntary exchange. This presents a problem for Greek CDS: if there’s no default, there’s no credit event, and CDS never pays off even though bondholders lost 50% of principal. This is ISDA’s official conclusion and it’s just sort of self-evidently right, although some people disagree.
Felix Salmon sums up the general outrage:
[O]n one level, the ISDA statement that this still isn’t a Greek default, for CDS purposes, makes some sense. I’d probably make the same decision myself. But on the other hand, this does make a farce of the idea that credit default swaps constitute default protection, at least in the sovereign arena. If they don’t protect you against this, what earthly use are they?
Well, with most derivatives, it’s important to remember that the marginal investor isn’t buying them for payoff-at-maturity but for the market moves along the way. People equate CDS to insurance but it’s not. If you buy life insurance, it pays out if you die and it doesn’t if you don’t; if you just decide to take up drunk cliff-diving you don’t get any interim payment. Most CDS never pays out because defaults are rare, but it’s still a healthy market. Most investors don’t primarily care if CDS pays off when they crystallize a loss by handing in a bond in a pseudo-voluntary pseudo-default, because they’re unlikely to do that. They care if their CDS mark goes up, in a realizable way, while their mark on the bond goes down. And it sort of does:
So you can exit your position today with a gain on the CDS that looks directionally like the loss on your debt.
Of course that argument shouldn’t be taken too far, because it’s a backwards induction argument: someone will buy it because they think (someone will buy it because they think [recurse]) it has a payout schedule corresponding in a predictable way to a possible reality. If the thing doesn’t pay out when it’s supposed to, the backward induction doesn’t work. For someone to be willing to close out your CDS today, they have to think it’s worth something – that it would pay out in the circumstances where it’s supposed to pay out. And why would they think that?
Well, because it probably would. If you wanted to be a jerk, you could buy $1000 of Greek bonds and $1000 of CDS and wait. The voluntary exchange would happen, you’d ignore it, and your debt would come due. Then you’d hand it in and expect your 100 cents on the dollar. If Greece honored your debt, you’d get 100 cents on the dollar on the debt and zero on the CDS. If it didn’t, then that definitely would be a credit event, and you’d get back X on the debt and 100 – X on the CDS. It is not entirely easy to predict which of these things would happen: if this purported exchange (or a future iteration of it) goes very well and leaves only a little stub of old debt, Greece will probably honor it; if not so much, then you’ll be looking to your CDS. Because you have no idea which will happen, you buy both.
All that is obvious. But you have to be a jerk to do it, because think of all the Greeks who will face ouzo shortages due to your dastardly market manipulations. And in particular, you probably have to not be a big bank for whom European regulators and/or the IIF can make life unpleasant. Peter Tchir:
I would be unwinding basis packages for all sovereign debt. If you are at a bank or a bank hedging desk, I would be selling bonds/loans and selling protection. Everything you thought about CDS and how the hedges would work is potentially irrelevant.
But if you’re selling that basis package, someone must be buying it, and the guy buying it is a jerk: a hedge fund who is willing to stare down the IIF, the EU, and Greek protesters and say “give me my money back or I will go complain to ISDA.”
This is all fine and obvious and straightforward and actually probably not a reason to think that the Greek exchange will spell the end of sovereign CDS markets, because the Greek CDS market is still trading and basis is not horrific despite this basic structure of “voluntary” exchange having been on the table for months.
So why is it so much fun to freak out about this? Part of it is that it is sort of optically complicated: the ISDA determination process seems opaque, and is divorced from both economic reality and things like ratings agency determinations, which take a dimmer view of “voluntary” principal writedowns. Part of it is that the EU’s determination not to trigger CDS does seem of a piece with their annoying determination to assault all markets, everywhere, out of an irrational hatred of speculators and anyone who would profit on Europe’s incompetence, and in the aggregate that determination to shut down short selling, derivatives, etc. etc. probably will make European capital markets less useful.
But I think the freakout also reflects how counterintuitive it is that you need so few jerks to make CDS work. It seems likely that a large majority of Greek debt will be exchanged at fifty cents on the dollar (or less – this isn’t done yet), by investors who will “voluntarily” give up a chance to call a default, collect on any derivatives they may have, and be made whole. That doesn’t matter. They can offload those derivatives. And you only need a very few people to refuse: there’s something under $4 billion of Greek CDS net notional outstanding, versus $245bn of Greek government debt, meaning that you’d need to get less than 2% of the debt market to make the simple scheme above work.* Everyone else can trade in CDS to their heart’s content, before, during and after this exchange, because the expectation is that 2% of Greece’s debt is likely to eventually find its way into the hands of investors who will stand on their contractual rights rather than chip in to help keep the European experiment alive.
This is counterintuitive but it’s why people can go around talking about zero-arbitrage models and efficient markets with an almost straight face. You don’t need everyone buying CDS to expect it to pay out, you just need a buyer of last resort who’ll make it pay out. You don’t need tons of short sellers to root out fraud, but you do need to allow short selling so that one or two clever and capitalized short sellers can bet against the frauds. You don’t need all the buyers to think the price is right, just the marginal buyer.
Greek CDS “works” only in the limit case, only for a non-bank investor who’s willing to be a jerk and run a certain amount of politico-PR risk. But that doesn’t mean it mostly doesn’t work. It means it entirely works.
* This sentence is loose: default on some de minimis amount of Greek debt would trigger all the Greek CDS in the universe; it’s not tied to notional amounts. However, given delivery obligation auction mechanics, a de minimis default would screw with recovery values. In any case it should be clear that keeping $1 of Greek debt out of the exchange would be insufficient to protect CDS buyers and keeping $10bn out is unnecessary.


No fucking chance I am approaching this bro. Pmco can you give me a summary like last time?
blah, blah, blah and, oh yeah, blah blah.
That's it in a nutshell.
ISDA & Wollensky
You put them in the tray, close the tray, and press play.
- UBS Quant
i gave the first paragraph a try realized it was matt, skipped a couple paragraphs, saw the graph skipped it completely
You're gonna have to be more specific, Matt.
Hey, can anyone tell me what a CDS is and how to trade it?
-AIG FP Quant
Matt, could you please post your analysis here before you post them at ZH?
ask the UBS quant guy
The front page teaser needs some sort of disclosure so I don't waste my time with the first paragraph or two.
Nice job on the tags
OPA!
I actually liked it.
I like the chart Matt.
- M Bloomberg
meh i'll give it another go
This is a pretty straightforward explanation of why Greek CDS are still viable assets (using that term in the broadest sense). It's not too jargon-heavy nor too dense. Generally, Matt's posts provide a nice counter-balance to Bess' casual posts on wall street. The only problem that creeps in is that Matt seems to have imbibed a large amount of the Kool Aid GS dishes out on a daily basis, especially about the efficiency of markets and Wall Street's "regulate us in any way and the economy is dooooooommmed" which has been disproven over and over and over again. I have a lot of friends who work there, and possibly my favorite was the dead serious "We were fully hedged to AIG, we would have been fine and didn't need the bailout money"; I also have flying pigs in my backyard.
As if you would have any clue about what goes on inside GS, Zach. DIAGF.
Bro, what's metaphorical about a musical called 'splooge drenched blow job queen'?
Wait, there's some kind of correlation between investors believing your claims about the liquidity and value of your assets and what your pig can do? Whoops
As an aside, Mandy's boobie cleavage is killing me today
The trick is that with 98% of the debt haircut via "suasion", the authorities will probably just let Greece pay the other 2%. If you have a basis package, great. If you just had naked CDS, sorry, Charlie.
The other thing is that some dealers (i.e. the ones on Greece's advisory payroll — BNP, for instance) run around threatening holders with outlandish scenarios of how Greece could get away with not paying, yet still avoid triggering CDS. Mostly hogwash, but given that these banks have reps on the ISDA Determinations Committee, it may actually frighten some of the "jerks" into surrendering their rights, too.
Thanks for the heads up!
Weird — within one minute of me switching on CNBC, they start talking about CDS on Greek debt.
Is é seo do na héireann éagórach.
@20… no ass clevage today
You mean something like "By Matt Levine"?
Sorry to be so tardy Mexi, I was at my 99th interview for a position as a professional homeless person. Sadly, they said I was over qualified for the job. Exec Synopsis of article:
1. Ooooh look. These new Greek bonds are shinier than the old ones.
2. No default = no payment under a CDS (henceforth we shall call defaults a "credit event")
3. If you drive drunk you could kill yourself.
4. Is it just me or does backwards induction sound like it might be really good fun?
5. CDS buyers and sellers are jerks.
6. Fuck the chart of Greek CDS. This post needed a photo of an Apollo statue (no maple leaf)
Flying Bacon?
No it isn't.
E. A. Blair
English
I rather be Long Greece and Short this article.
Interesting tag, great success!
Khazak minister of tags
God I'm going to miss gyros.
Pictures (or screen caps) or it didn't happen
Great post again.
Greece is being sold. CDS will be orphaned.
I think this post is quite off-base? Why the straight run to "default" as the key potential credit event here? It's actually not default, it's restructuring. And this would SO be a restructuring and a credit event–if the Greek bonds were covered under Greek law: http://bit.ly/vmoMxv
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