Smoking Swap Guns in EuroLand: Sovereign Debt Buyer Beware
by ilene - March 4th, 2010 9:01 pm
Smoking Swap Guns in EuroLand: Sovereign Debt Buyer Beware
Courtesy of Reggie Middleton’s BoomBustBlog.com
There are broad indications hinting that Italy and Greece are not the only countries that have used swap agreements to manipulate its budget and deficit figures. France and Portugal may be two other European economies which have resorted to similar manipulations in the past in order to qualify as part of single currency member nations (Euro Zone). Below is a small subset of the research that I have been gathering as I construct a global sovereign default model. This model is very comprehensive and thus far has indicated that quite a few (as in more than two or three) nations of significance have a 90% probability of defaulting on their debt in the near to medium term.
More on this later. Now let’s dig into what we have found that looks like gross manipulation of the numbers in order to hide debt in several European countries. I think I’ll call it the Pan-European Ponzi. Conspiracy theorists are going to love this post.
Like Italy (see below), Portugal has also been known for years to take advantage of derivatives contracts to dress up its budget numbers in the late 1990s. In a recent press article (Debt Deals Haunt Europe) Deutsche Bank’s spokesman Roland Weichert commented that the bank executed currency swaps on behalf of Portugal between 1998 and 2003. He also said that Deutsche Bank’s (DB) business with Portugal included "completely normal currency swaps" and other business activity, which he declined to discuss in detail. He also added that the currency swaps on behalf of Portugal were within the "framework of sovereign-debt management," and the trades weren’t intended to hide Portugal’s national debt position (yeah okay!).
Though the Portuguese finance ministry declined to comment on whether Portugal has used currency swaps such as those used by Greece, it said Portugal only uses financial instruments that comply with European Union rules. Thus, if the use of these instruments complied with