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from Breakingviews:

Asia’s bonds look shinier as Europe and China slump

By Wayne Arnold

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Asian bonds seem likely to gain from growing anxiety about Europe and China. The region’s robust finances have made its sovereign debt a safe haven as larger economies sputter. An indiscriminate sell-off would hurt everyone, but Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines all have qualities that should give them greater resilience.

Worse-than-expected economic data from China and the prospect of a Greek exit from the euro zone have sparked a stampede from risk assets. Investors fear global growth will slow, and that the sell-off will snowball. One way bleaker conditions in Europe could reach Asia is through its banks. European lenders pulled at least $135.8 billion in credit out of Asia in the second half of 2011, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

Asian sovereign bonds should benefit from weaker growth, lower inflation and lower interest rates. The safest are those that are also less vulnerable to outflows. Indonesia, for example, has public debt of less than a quarter of GDP - even Germany owes three times as much. It has relatively little short-term external debt and a much lower reliance on credit from European banks than other Asian economies. Yet the government’s 10-year bonds yield 4.7 percentage points more than Treasuries.

Japan, despite bonds that yield less than Treasuries and a government debt 1.5 times larger relative to its economy than Greece’s, is safer still. Foreigners own less than 7 percent of its bonds, which limits the potential for forced selling, and Japanese deflation has kept demand steady. By contrast, foreigners hold 80 percent of Australia’s government debt.

The most unlikely refuge is the Philippines. Though impoverished, its government has managed to build a $76 billion foreign reserve buffer, equivalent to almost six times its short-term external debt, and finances 95 percent of its public debt at home. Yet Philippine bonds still pay 4 percent more than U.S. Treasuries. Such trades are still risky - not everyone wants to go long the Philippine peso. But the worse things get elsewhere, the more palatable that risk may seem.

from Breakingviews:

Euro zone carry trade has limited shelf life

By Neil Unmack and Fiona Maharg-Bravo

The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.

The carry trade is alive and well in Spain and Italy. Banks are loading up on sovereign debt, thanks to the wave of liquidity from the European Central Bank’s cheap three-year loans. But local lenders can’t fund Madrid and Rome indefinitely, and with markets still dysfunctional, money could run out sooner than expected.

Spanish and Italian banks borrowed 220 billion and 140 billion euros of new money, respectively, under the ECB’s cheap three-year facilities. So far, they have mainly used the cash to replace privately-held bonds that are falling due, or to buy government debt. Spanish banks have bought 85 billion euros of sovereign paper between December and April, while Italian lenders have propped up the state to the tune of 77 billion euros. That’s allowed the two countries to carry on borrowing when international investors are scarce.

In theory, this could carry on for a while. RBC estimates Spanish banks have 82 billion euros of ECB cash left over - double the 41 billion euros that Madrid still needs to raise this year. As some investors - particularly domestic ones - are likely to swap maturing government bonds for new ones, Spain may only need 20 billion euros of new money. Italian banks, meanwhile, have 53 billion euros of ECB firepower, according to RBC. If domestic investors play ball, the government’s funding gap this year is around 70 billion euros.

Moreover, despite their recent splurge, banks have room to increase their holdings. Sovereign bonds account for just 7 percent of total balance sheet assets in Spain and 7.8 percent in Italy. In 1999, the share in both countries was over 10 percent. In Japan, it’s 23 percent.

However, larger banks like Santander, BBVA and UniCredit are unlikely to increase their sovereign exposure. Smaller banks face less scrutiny from markets, but also have less spare liquidity. Besides, banks have more pressing needs: Spanish lenders must refinance about 65 billion euros of funding this year, and there’s little prospect of them being able to tap wholesale markets.

from Felix Salmon:

Is sovereign immunity hurting America?

Back in November, Alison Frankel had a very sensible and clear-eyed analysis of the lawsuit which a Cayman-based hedge fund, Fir Tree, is bringing against, essentially, the government of Ireland. In short, Ireland has sovereign immunity, so, no dice. Sorry, better luck next time.

Since then, there's been no real new news in the case. But for some reason the Economist has decided all of a sudden that this is a terribly important case which "eviscerates law in New York" and which raises a host of worries:

If America’s legal system cannot be relied on for deals done in America, it will become a less attractive place to do business. Borrowing costs may rise, which could prompt non-American companies to take business elsewhere. At the very least, terms will be tweaked.

To make a long story short, the saga here is that Fir Tree wound up buying Anglo Irish debt obligations which were written under New York law. But then Anglo Irish got nationalized, so Fir Tree no longer has a simple commercial contract in New York, facing a bank: it's now having to line up with other bank creditors of the Irish government.

That's not a great outcome for Fir Tree, but it's simply what happens when a bank gets nationalized. Fir Tree would have been no better off had Anglo Irish simply been left to go bust, which was the only other alternative. And any time anybody lends money to a foreign company, they know there's a risk of nationalization -- especially when that foreign company is a bank.

The law in New York, it's important to emphasize, has not been eviscerated at all. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act is the law in New York, it has been the law in New York for as long as anybody can remember, and anybody writing contracts in New York knows about it. Does the existence of the FSIA make New York "a less attractive place to do business"? Not really: it's been around for a long time, with no visible effect on New York's attractiveness as a commercial center.

What's more, you can't "tweak" the terms of a contract to get around the risk that a foreign company will become nationalized and thereby subject to the FSIA. That's a known risk for any lender, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Moving the contract to some other jurisdiction wouldn't help, either: the world's major commercial centers all have laws giving foreign sovereigns immunity on a very broad front. New York is in no way exceptional in that.

from Felix Salmon:

Argentina vs Elliott: It’s not about pari passu any more

Earlier this month I wrote about Argentina, Elliott, and the pari passu war -- the legal fight between New York hedge funds and the country of Argentina over bonds which Argentina defaulted on almost a decade ago.

The latest development in the case is that Elliott has now filed its own 89-page brief. There's some smart legal argument in there, as you'd expect from Ted Olson. (Elliott has never been a company to scrimp on legal fees.) But the most surprising bit, at least to me, is that Elliott is quite explicitly distancing itself from its own pari passu argument.

Elliott more or less invented the pari passu argument, in 2000, when it was fighting a similar case against Peru. But this time around, Elliott's slicing up the pari passu clause very thinly, and discarding the pari passu bit of it entirely.

Here's the clause that Argentina agreed to when it issued its original debt:

The Securities will constitute... direct, unconditional, unsecured and unsubordinated obligations of the Republic and shall at all times rank pari passu and without any preference among themselves. The payment obligations of the Republic under the Securities shall at all times rank at least equally with all its other present and future unsecured and unsubordinated External Indebtedness.

And here's Elliott, parsing it:

That pari passu clause is not at issue here... The relevant clause is the second sentence, in which Argentina promises that it will ““rank”” ““payment obligations”” under the FAA Bonds ““at least equally”” with obligations under its other ““unsubordinated External Indebtedness.”” To distinguish this undertaking from the irrelevant pari passu clause in the previous sentence, Appellees refer to it as the ““Equal Treatment Provision.”"

from Felix Salmon:

Why Richard Koo’s idea won’t save the Eurozone

A lot of people were looking forward to Richard Koo deliver his paper at INET last week; it comes with associated slides, here. Koo is the intellectual father of the idea of the balance-sheet recession -- an idea which was born in Japan, has increasingly been adopted in the US and the UK, and which is now gaining traction in the Eurozone.

Koo's diagnosis that Europe is in a balance-sheet recession, which he defines as a post-bubble-bursting state of affairs where individuals and companies choose to pay down their debts rather than borrow money, even when interest rates are at zero. That certainly seems to be the problem in Spain; Koo's charts can be hard to read, but what you're seeing here is a massive borrowing binge by the Spanish corporate sector -- the dark-blue line -- suddenly turning into net savings after the crisis hits. And to make matters worse, Spanish households -- the red line -- did exactly the same thing. As a result, the government had to run a massive deficit after the crisis; the four lines always have to sum to zero.

In this kind of a recession, monetary policy -- reducing rates to zero -- doesn't work. And tax cuts don't work either: they just increase household savings. You need government spending, at least until the economy has warmed up to the point at which companies and individuals start borrowing again. And the good news is that in a balance sheet recession, government spending is pretty much cost-free, since interest rates are at zero.

That's the good news in Japan and the US and the UK, anyway. But it's not the case in Spain. This is a big problem with the single currency, as Koo explains: it encourages capital to flow in exactly the wrong direction.

When presented with a deleveraging private sector, fund managers in non- eurozone countries can place their money only in their own government’s bonds if constraints prevent them from taking on more currency risk or principle risk.

In contrast, eurozone fund managers who are not allowed to take on more principle risk or currency risk are not required to buy their own country’s bonds: they can also buy bonds issued by other eurozone governments because they all share the same currency. Thus, fund managers at French and German banks were busily moving funds into Spanish and Greek bonds a number of years ago in search of higher yields, and Spanish and Portuguese fund managers are now buying German and Dutch government bonds for added safety, all without incurring foreign exchange risk.

The former capital flow aggravated real estate bubbles in many peripheral countries prior to 2008, while the latter flow triggered a sovereign debt crisis in the same countries after 2008. Indeed, the excess domestic savings of Spain and Portugal fled to Germany and Holland just when the Spanish and Portuguese governments needed them to fight balance sheet recessions. That capital flight pushed bond yields higher in peripheral countries and forced their governments into austerity when their private sectors were also deleveraging. With both public and private sectors saving money, the economies fell into deflationary spirals which took the unemployment rate to 23 percent in Spain and to nearly 15 percent in Ireland and Portugal.

With the recipients, Germany and Holland, also aiming for fiscal austerity, the savings that flowed into these countries remained unborrowed and became a deflationary gap for the entire eurozone. It will be difficult to expect stable economic growth until something is done about these highly pro-cyclical and destabilizing capital flows unique to the eurozone.

The solution to this problem is eurobonds. If all the eurozone countries funded themselves jointly and severally, then the yields on European government debt would be very low, and there would be no fiscal crisis in Spain.

from Felix Salmon:

Argentina, Elliott, and the pari passu war

Anna Gelpern puts it well: "for the small but committed contingent of pari passu pointy heads, this is WorldCupOlympicMarchMadnessSuperBowl." I'm one of the contingent, and I've been actively enjoying myself reading various appeals and amici briefs in the case of Elliott Associates vs Argentina. (Technically, it's not Elliott Associates but rather NML, an Elliott sub-fund, but make no mistake: this is very much a fight between Argentina and the most famous vulture fund in the world.)

Elliott, which is run by the billionaire Republican activist Paul Singer, has suffered a rare and public loss with respect to its Argentina strategy. It bought up Argentine debt around the time the country defaulted, and then refused to enter into the country's bond exchange, taking its chances in U.S. court instead. That, in hindsight, was a mistake: Argentina's new bonds, turbo-charged with GDP warrants, performed extremely well. While its defaulted debt has gone absolutely nowhere.

When Elliott started litigating its defaulted debt a decade ago, it quite explicitly told the judge in the U.S. Southern District, Thomas Griesa, that it wouldn't wheel out the most notorious and legally dubious weapon in its arsenal: the pari passu argument it used to devastating effect against Peru in 2000. In 2003, indeed, Argentina's lawyers asked the court for a declaration that the argument was legally bonkers; the only reason that Griesa didn't provide that declaration was that Elliott Associates -- in line with all the other holdout creditors -- said that it had no intention of making the argument, "at any time in the near or distant future".

In fact, Elliott was just playing the waiting game -- waiting, that is, for 91% of the other creditors to go away, persuaded by Argentina to accept its exchange offer. And then, after a decent amount of time -- five years -- it suddenly decided that it was going to attempt to use its rather odd pari passu argument after all.

Waiting that long held dangers, since it smells of what lawyers call "laches" -- unreasonable delay in making a claim. But it was also quite smart, since at that point Elliott had been fighting Argentina in front of Judge Griesa for a decade, and Griesa was officially Fed Up with the whole thing and just wanted to make it go away.

Griesa's orders (here here here) are notable for their lack of legal reasoning: Griesa is throwing his hands in the air, here, and basically punting the whole issue up to the appeals court. Each one is very short, certainly in comparison to the long, compelling, and clearly-argued amici briefs, let alone Argentina's masterful, 84-page response. After reading that, and the briefs from the Justice Department and The Clearing House , it's basically impossible to see how Griesa's order can possibly be upheld on appeal.

It's hard to count the number of reasons why Griesa's ruling doesn't make sense, but it's worth running down a few of them. For one thing, the whole thing is based on the "ratable payment" reading of the pari passu clause -- that, in the words of NYU law professor Andreas Lowenfeld, "a borrower from Tom, Dick, and Harry can't say 'I will pay Tom and Dick in full, and if there is anything left over I'll pay Harry'." Unfortunately, that's exactly what the borrower can do. If I owe money to my landlord and to my credit-card issuer and to my brother-in-law, it's up to me which of them I repay, and in which order. All those creditors might have legal recourse if I don't pay them. But the landlord can't claim the money I'm paying to my brother-in-law, nor vice-versa.

from MacroScope:

For insatiable markets, Spanish steps fall short

So much for the lasting power of the ECB’s 1 trillion euros in cheap bank loans. Spain is again looking like a basket-case, more because of market dynamics rather than any particular policy misteps.

Many observers have praised Spain for its willingness to implement reforms. And yet the markets have another idea. The cost of insuring debt issued by Spanish banks against default has risen sharply over the past month, as a tough budget this week did little to soothe concerns over the country's deteriorating fiscal situation.

Default insurance for Santander is up 52 percent since March 1 to 393 basis points and the equivalent for BBVA jumped 54 percent over the same period. Both Spanish banks underperformed the Markit iTraxx senior financials index – which measures Europe's financial institutions' insurance, or credit default swap prices. It rose by 20 percent over the same period.

Markit analyst Gavan Nolan said a lot of the move was caused by the European Central Bank's low-interest, three-year loan programmes, or LTROs, that have pumped money into the banking system.

They've actually tightened the relationship between the banks and the sovereign. So the banks have been buying sovereign debt and that has made their fortunes even more intertwined than they have previously.

Pressure on Spanish government debt has had a knock-on effect on banks. Yields on 10-year Spanish bonds this week rose to their highest since December 2011 at 5.8 percent after the Spanish Treasury had to pay more dearly to borrow in an auction.

The cost of insuring Spanish sovereign debt against default meanwhile has jumped 111 basis points to 467 bps over the past month, according to Markit data. This means it costs $467,000 annually to buy $10 million of protection against a Spanish default using a five-year CDS contract.

from Felix Salmon:

Will Greek CDS ever trade again?

Back on March 23, Christopher Whittall explained why we don't have a good go-to measure of Greece's creditworthiness, in the wake of its big bond exchange: Greece's credit default swaps can't trade yet. There's something called a 60-day look-back clause in the standard CDS documentation, which means that if a country has defaulted in the past 60 days, somebody who owns credit protection can claim that there has been an event of default and ask to be paid out. Since we're still well within 60 days of the default event on March 9, anybody buying Greek credit default swaps now could trigger them immediately.

But after today's news, it's far from clear that Greek CDS will even start trading after the 60 days are up. It turns out that while Greece managed to swap its old domestic debt into new bonds quite seamlessly and easily, the same's not true of Greece's foreign bonds.

In a statement, the Public Debt Management Agency said investors holding 20 of the 36 bonds in question either voted down or otherwise failed to approve key changes to the bond contracts...

Last week euro-zone finance ministers issued a statement which hinted strongly that they would back Greece if it didn't make the payments on foreign law bonds.

On May 15, Greece must redeem one of those foreign law notes worth €450 million.

Basically, there are now roughly €9 billion of bonds outstanding which are still old bonds which haven't been swapped. And those bonds are likely to be a real headache for Greece. The obvious thing for Greece to do would be to simply refuse to pay anybody who holds those bonds and didn't tender into the exchange. I would certainly follow that course, if I were in Greece's shoes.

But that would mean that there would be a second Greek default -- and that going forwards, there would be a semi-permanent stock of defaulted Greek debt out there. In turn, that would make it difficult to trade Greek CDS, since Greece is likely to be in default, on billions of dollars of foreign debt, for as far as the eye can see.

Now it's possible to ring-fence that debt and say that it doesn't count towards a CDS trigger. Non-trivial, but possible. The question is whether anybody really has the appetite to do that. Or whether Greece, and the Eurocrats paying its bills, would actually be quite happy if Greek CDS didn't trade at all from here on in.

from Felix Salmon:

A top CDS trader quits the CDS market

Ben Heller, a man who's been trading CDS since before they were even called CDS, is out of the CDS market.

There have been rumblings about this market for a while: an FT article from March 9 quoted a series of unhappy people on both the buy side and the sell side.

One banker working on the Greek bond deal says: “I almost wanted CDS not to be triggered just so it would kill off the instrument and then we could set about designing something better to replace it.”

But with Heller going on the record about this, the pressure on ISDA to fix what is widely seen as a broken system is surely going to increase. Because he's not alone.

"Many of the people you know from EMCA," he tells me at the end of this video, "are people who are very focused on this issue and who are not going to let this one go."

The world has long forgotten EMCA, an attempt by investors in emerging-market debt to team up and provide a united front in the face of attempted sovereign debt restructurings. But back when it was founded in 2000, it included all the biggest names in the emerging-market debt world, including Heller, who was then at HBK; Mark Siegel, at MassMutual; Abby McKenna, at Morgan Stanley Asset Management; Mark Dow, at MFS; and Mohamed El-Erian, at Pimco. The membership of Dow and El-Erian was particularly important, because they had both worked for many years in the official sector (Dow at Treasury, El-Erian at the IMF), and were taken seriously by policymakers.

from Felix Salmon:

Greece’s CDS: more lucky than smart

It's official:

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. (ISDA) today announced that its EMEA Credit Derivatives Determinations Committee resolved unanimously that a Restructuring Credit Event has occurred with respect to The Hellenic Republic (Greece).

The word that jumps out at me here is Restructuring. In Europe, restructuring counts as a credit event; in north America, by contrast, it doesn't. Which means that the derivatives market was pretty lucky here. If the standard Greek CDS documentation had looked like the standard US CDS documentation, there wouldn't have been a credit event, as ISDA spokesman Steve Kennedy confirmed to me via email:

If you own CDS, and if you do not have restructuring as a credit event in your contract, it would not trigger if a CAC were invoked. You would know this going in. It is not a surprise.

The issue of restructuring as a credit event has been discussed for a decade. In other words, where restructuring is not a standard credit event (such as for US corporates), protection buyers buy the CDS protection knowing that there is no restructuring clause, that the credit event triggers are failure to pay and bankruptcy (for corporates) and repudiation/moratorium (for sovereigns), and the CDS is priced accordingly.

Now this isn't quite as scary as it looks at first glance, because while US bonds do include CACs, if you want to amend the payment terms, you typically need 100% of the bondholders to agree to change the terms. A CDS holder could therefore buy a single bond and thereby ensure payment default and CDS payout.

But still, the whole CDS saga in Greece and elsewhere does rather feel as though ISDA is making it up as it goes along. Check this out, from the official FAQ:

How can an auction be held if there are no “old bonds” because they have been exchanged for new bonds?

The EMEA Determinations Committee will ultimately decide which of the obligations are deliverable under the Credit Derivatives Definitions for purposes of the Greek CDS settlement auction. It is important to note that Greece has outstanding a wide variety of obligations. Not all existing bonds are covered by the use of CACs. In addition, new bonds are being issued that might satisfy the requirements for deliverable obligations.