Plunderball – The new Euro banking game

Golem XIV -

So who will get shafted next? Will your lucky numbers come up?

We’ve all heard of deposit insurance, but does it mean what we all thought it meant – that up to a given sum we would not lose any money if our bank collapsed? And by the way – who pays the bill?

The simple idea we have all believed in was that up to a specified amount our money was guaranteed by a government  deposit insurance scheme. Most countries have one. As long as your bank is in it you’re covered. Or at least you were till this week.

Before we get to the rapidly evolving changes lets just go over the details of what used to be the case.

It used to be that below the guarentee limit your money was safe. It was only any amount above the guarantee, that you could lose in a restructuring. When a bank went under the normal bankruptcy rules swung into action (I’m leaving aside the TBTF gorilla in the room. Let’s not poke him just yet).TBTF aside – the collapsed banks’ assets would collected in into a pile and all the bank’s creditors (those who bought its debt, lent it money, put their money into it) would be put on a list in order of seniority, with share holders at the bottom, unsecured and Junior bond holders next with Senior insured bond holders at the top. Depositors were always ranked up there with Senior bond holders. Those at top would get most if not all of their money back and not take a loss, those at the bottom would lose everything.

As a depositor  you could still lose whatever money you had in the bank that was above the threshold but you might not. Your chances would be in line with the Senior bond holders. But as this bank debt debalce has mutated over the past 5 years so the old ranking of creditors has mutated with it. First the bail out funds like the EFSF and the ECB itself have made themeslves super senior. They have put themselves above Senior bond holders meaning in the event of a bank collape the ECB and EFSF, if they had been lending the bank money in return for collateral – would be first in line to get paid.

The private bond holders and the banks struck back at this idea a couple of years ago by ramping up the use of Covered Bonds. Covered bonds are  way of trying to put private bond holders back above the ECB and EFSF. They are sold to investors on the claim that they are not just covered by a senior claim on the general assets of the bank – which would make them the same as traditional Senior bond holders – but that the Covered Bonds were also backed by a specially ‘ring-fenced’ set of assets of their own. So in a collapse the Covered Bond holders would have those ring-fenced assets withheld specially for them from the general pool of assets everyone else was queuing up for.

It remains to be seen if the ECB et al would recognize this arrangement as being senior even to them. It also is not  clear to me in what I have read – if even the assets in the ‘ring-fence’ might not be pledged to more than one covered bond and possible even be hypothecated. None of this has, so far as I know, actually been tested in a case of competing claims at bankruptcy.

Be all that as it may – what is clear is that any amount of money you had above the guaranteed threshold would always have been at risk, BUT at the top of the pecking order alongside Senior Bond holders.

Read More: golemxiv.co.uk

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