jueves, 26 de enero de 2012
Greek Debt Talks Resume in Athens as Policy Makers Squabble Over Haircut
Publicado el jueves, enero 26, 2012
By
Nicholas Comfort and Sonia Sirletti
Talks on a debt swap to lower
Greece’s borrowings and avert a collapse of the economy resume
today as international policy makers squabble over the mounting
cost of the rescue.
Charles Dallara and Jean Lemierre, negotiating on behalf of
private creditors, return to Athens after European finance
ministers insisted bondholders take bigger losses on their Greek
debt. The International Monetary Fund further roiled the
discussions by suggesting that public holders of Greek bonds
might also have to increase support.
The parties are groping for a solution three months after
private bondholders agreed with European officials to implement
a 50 percent cut in the face value of more than 200 billion
euros ($262 billion) of debt by voluntarily swapping bonds for
new securities. Since then, an economic contraction that
exceeded estimates has made the goal of cutting Greece’s debt to
120 percent of gross domestic product by 2020 harder. An accord
is tied to a second bailout for the country, which faces a 14.5
billion-euro bond payment on March 20.
“The cost of postponing a solution is extremely high for
Europe, but especially for the future of the euro,” said
Giovanni Bossi, chief executive officer of Banca Ifis SpA, an
Italian financial-services company that doesn’t own Greek debt.
“The parties are very close to a deal. It’s time to close.”
Bonds from Germany, France and Italy rose today and the
euro climbed to a one-month high. The currency traded at $1.3156
at 3:22 p.m. in Athens.
“There are always tensions and a tug of war in these
areas,” Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny told Bloomberg
Television late yesterday in Davos, Switzerland, when asked
about the struggles over the swap. “The end result of all this
should be strong leadership, decisiveness from a European
perspective, a focus on growth and jobs, which can grow the
economies of Europe and can have the European market achieve the
full potential of the single market.”
Dallara, the managing director of the Washington-based
Institute of International Finance, said on Jan. 24 that all
parties, public and private, should contribute to cutting
Greece’s debt. Private investors hold only about 60 percent of
Greece’s 350 billion euros of debt, he said. The IIF is an
industry group with more than 450 members.
He’ll meet Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos at 8 p.m.,
the state-run Athens News Agency reported.
The last offer from the private bondholders would lead to a
loss of about 69 percent on the net-present value of Greek
bonds, two people with knowledge of the talks said on Jan. 23.
The new 30-year bonds would carry an average coupon of about
4.25 percent, said the people, who declined to be identified
because the talks are private.
European finance ministers meeting in Brussels signaled
they would push Greece’s private investors to accept bigger
losses, with coupons below 3.5 percent for debt to be serviced
until 2020 and below 4 percent over the 30 years of the next
Greek package.
Dallara will make a new proposal that the new bonds should
carry a weighted average coupon of 3.75 percent, Kathimerini
reported, without saying how it got the information.
“What we’re seeing is haggling over the details and it
will go on until the last minute,” said Christian Muschick, a
banking analyst at Silvia Quandt Research GmbH in Frankfurt.
Christine Lagarde, a former French finance minister who is
the IMF’s managing director, said that European governments and
other public holders of Greek debt may have to increase support
if private creditors don’t go far enough.
Michael Meister, the deputy floor leader for German
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the party’s
ranking finance spokesman, rejected suggestions that the
European Central Bank take losses on its Greek debt holdings.
“I can’t imagine that European politicians would allow
third parties to make such an indecent claim on our central
bank,” said Meister in an interview yesterday.
While the ECB faces pressure to join private-sector
investors in accepting losses on Greek debt, the central bank
sees any participation as risking damaging confidence in the
institution, two people familiar with the Governing Council’s
stance said. The debt was acquired for monetary policy purposes
and the ECB is firmly opposed to any restructuring, they said on
condition of anonymity because the matter is confidential.
Angel Gurria, secretary general of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, said it would be a “good
idea” for the ECB to accept losses on Greek bonds.
“We always proposed this should be done and it will also
help create an atmosphere of equal treatment,” he said in a
Bloomberg Television interview yesterday. “The ECB bought these
bonds at a discount and I think at least this discount could be
accrued in favor of Greece.”
ECB President Mario Draghi said on Jan. 19 that the ECB is
“not party” to discussions between the Greek government and
the private sector. The ECB is in talks regarding a potential
swap of its Greek bonds that would ease the country’s debt load
and avoid losses at the central bank, the New York Times
reported yesterday, citing unnamed officials.
An ECB spokesman declined to comment.
Meister urged private creditors to reach a deal, saying
that it is “in the interest of private holders of Greek bonds
to accept the terms of a writedown.”
After a meeting of the creditors’ steering committee
yesterday in Paris, Greek bondholders said they would send a
team of experts to Athens to continue negotiations with the
Greek government on the debt swap, with the goal of agreeing on
all outstanding legal and technical issues as soon as possible.
Dallara and Lemierre, who is also a senior adviser to the
chairman of BNP Paribas SA, will return to Athens today for
“informal discussions,” according to an e-mailed statement.
Losses on sovereign bonds by Greece’s creditors won’t
enable the country to get a handle on its debt, according to the
Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Greece’s debt load will be
“unbearably high” even if public creditors join investors in
taking 50 percent writedowns, the institute, which advises the
German government, said in a study published on its website.
The creditors’ steering committee negotiating the debt swap
includes representatives from banks and insurers with the
largest holdings of Greek government bonds, including National
Bank of Greece SA, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank AG (CBK), Deutsche Bank
AG (DBK), Intesa Sanpaolo SpA (ISP), ING Groep NV, Allianz SE (ALV) and Axa SA. (CS)
Financial firms on the IIF’s private-creditor investor
committee, a larger group of 32 members that includes the
smaller steering committee, hold more than 47 billion euros in
Greek sovereign debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg
from company reports.
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