Irish Banks Hooked on ECB Cure as Lenihan's Financing Fails: Euro Credit
By Dara Doyle and Joe Brennan - Sep 29, 2010 12:59 PM GMT+0200 Wed Sep 29 10:59:07 GMT 2010
Irish Finance Minister
Brian Lenihan persuaded lawmakers two years ago to back a guarantee of the country’s financial system to give banks time to wean themselves off European Central Bank and government life support.
Instead, the banks are growing more dependent on the ECB. The cost of insuring Irish government debt against default has soared to a record as bond buyers shun Irish lenders, forcing the Dublin-based parliament to debate extending a guarantee of all deposits and most bank securities as the original pledge expires today.
The consequences of adding bank liabilities to Ireland’s 87 billion euros ($118 billion) of sovereign debt “are huge,” said
Mike Soden, the former chief executive officer of Bank of Ireland Plc and the author of “Open Dissent,” a book on the financial crisis. The nation’s borrowing
costs are surging because “the markets are much quicker than the thinking power of the Department of Finance or anybody else,” he said.
The banks’ failure to find alternative funding sources in the capital markets is stoking investor concern that the state may be overwhelmed by bailout costs. The banks are “tied to the sovereign,” Lenihan said in a Sept. 22 speech to a parliamentary committee.
The extra yield investors
demand to hold 10-year Irish bonds over German bunds widened almost ninefold to 451 basis points since the guarantee was introduced in September 2008.
Euro Peripherals
Credit-default swaps linked to Irish debt fell 7 basis points to 482 basis points, compared with other so-called euro peripherals such as Greece at 815 basis points and Portugal at 459 basis points, according to CMA prices. The increase occurred after Standard & Poor’s said the cost of bailing out
Anglo Irish Bank Corp. may exceed 35 billion euros, fueling speculation Ireland’s government will be forced to choose between repaying senior bondholders and tackling the region’s largest budget deficit.
The government introduced a guarantee for all deposits and most bank securities in 2008 after the bankruptcy of New York- based investment bank
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. threatened to destroy the confidence of savers and investors.
Lenihan supplemented that in January with the
Eligible Liabilities Guarantee, allowing banks to sell bonds with maturities as long as five years. The original guarantee covered about 440 billion euros of liabilities when it was introduced, while 153 billion was guaranteed by the ELG as of June 30, according to Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency.
ECB Payments
Ireland-based credit institutions, including international and domestic companies, owed the ECB 95.1 billion euros as of Aug. 27, up from 89.5 billion euros a month earlier, according to the
central bank’s website.
Those debts will increase “significantly,” Credit Suisse analysts said in a Sept. 16 report to clients, estimating that Irish banks already account for about 10 percent of ECB funding. A report from the ECB is scheduled to be published next month.
“It will show how dependent Irish banks have become not just on government-guaranteed funding, but also on extremely generous provisions from the ECB,” said Credit Suisse analysts, including
Christel Aranda-Hassel and
Neville Hill. “If the ECB were to tighten liquidity support significantly next year, that could be extremely problematic for the banks and market concern for the financial sector would rapidly spread to the sovereign.”
Ireland’s debt is the second worst-performing globally this month, handing investors losses of 4.43 percent, compared with a 5.1 percent decline in Portuguese bonds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies.
‘Entirely Unrealistic’
“The reality is that in a small country like Ireland, it is entirely unrealistic to think one can detach the banking system from the sovereign,” Lenihan said at the parliamentary meeting on Sept. 22. “The difficulty with the guarantee is that the vulnerability of the banks becomes apparent.”
While some Irish lenders have been selling debt securities in private sales this year, no government-guaranteed lender has sold a benchmark bond since April, when
Irish Life & Permanent Plc borrowed 1.25 billion euros for three years.
EBS Building Society, the biggest-customer owned lender, said last week it has 3.5 billion euros of net collateral available which could be used to tap the ECB if markets remained closed. Davy, a Dublin-based securities firm, estimated Sept. 7 that Irish banks have 83 billion euros of unpledged collateral.
Property Loans
Irish banks had about 26 billion euros of government- guaranteed debt securities to roll over in September, Davy analysts said. They don’t have to refinance all that as sales of souring real-estate loans to the National Asset Management Agency reduce the amount of assets lenders need to fund.
Concern about refinancing challenges are “overdone” because the government will cover any shortfalls,
John Corrigan, chief executive officer of the National Treasury Management Agency, said on Sept. 24.
Parliament will vote today on extending the Eligible Liabilities Guarantee to include short-term corporate and interbank deposits. That guarantee, which is due to end Dec. 31, may have to be extended further, according to Credit Suisse.
“The problems with Ireland’s banking sector and the associated risks it poses to the sovereign are likely to continue for some time,” analysts at the Zurich-based bank said. “That should keep spreads wide and volatile.”
The euro has weakened by 5 percent against the dollar this year to $1.3615 on concern the debt crisis may rupture the common currency area. It may fall to $1.28 by the end of the year, according to the median estimate of 40 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Underperforming Market
Ireland’s benchmark
ISEQ Index has fallen 11 percent this year, compared with a 3 percent gain for the Stoxx Europe 600 Index. Bank of Ireland has dropped 37 percent this year and Allied Irish Banks Plc has dropped 58 percent.
“The banks will roll their large maturities during the fourth quarter with the help of the ECB, and the government has a buffer of about 20 billion euros,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief European Economist
Erik Nielsen said in a Sept. 26 note to clients. “But the government urgently needs to start another campaign, like the one late last year, to make investors fall back in love with them, if that’s possible.”
(Bloomberg)