ECB considering corporate bond purchases
A story on Reuters (see link below) reports ECB sources as stating that purchases of non-financial corporate bonds are being considered and could be decided on as soon as December, with purchases beginning in early 2015. This story does not come as much of a surprise to us. In Greg Fuzesi’s email on Friday we argued that the ECB was likely to take steps to encourage larger take up of the TLTROs at its meeting in early November. He wrote that “[t]hrough these changes the ECB can try to signal more determination about expanding its balance sheet. For this reason, we also see a rising likelihood that the ECB will expand its asset purchases into nonfinancial corporate bonds, which would allow it to get even closer to the €3 trillion balance sheet size that Draghi hinted at in the September meeting.”
According to our credit colleagues, ECB purchases would most likely be of fixed rate euro denominated bonds of at least €500 million outstanding that are included in the iBoxx Corporates index, due to price transparency and liquidity requirements. Within this, it is unlikely that the ECB would buy subordinated bonds as these are not even eligible as collateral in its refinancing operations. That leaves €750 billion of nonfinancial corporate bonds that the ECB may consider buying, around €500bn of which is issued by European corporates. Market turnover may currently be around 2.5% of outstanding (after correcting for double-counting in the turnover data) and the ECB may be able to purchase 10-20% of this turnover. In addition, the ECB could also go into the primary market, buying 10% of new deals (from a total gross issuance of almost €20 billion per month recently). Such considerations suggest that, as a rough guide, they could purchase around €50 billion over a one year period under current market conditions, and perhaps as high as €100 billion if purchases improve market conditions, raising turnover.
We are already expecting the ECB to announce in November that the 10bp spread on the TLTROs will be eliminated, that all the maturities in TLTROS will be raised to four years, and that the multiples on allocations for the operations after December will be raised from 3X to 6X. Another possibility to throw into the mix is that the initial allowance for the Sep-Dec TLTROs could be raised (it was initially set at 7% of the end April 2014 stock of non-financial private sector loans ex-mortgages). There are reports that this allocation is not enough to allow some peripheral banks to roll their borrowings from the old 3 year LTROs into the TLTRO, which may force them to make more usage of shorter dated ECB facilities on a rolling basis. Raising the allocation, say to 10%, may be one means of both boosting overall take up and ensuring peripheral banks have security of funding.