An interesting aspect of the European rescue plan for Greece is that the ISDA (the International Swaps and Derivatives Association) ruled that the restructuring was not a credit event for the purpose of settling credit default swaps. ISDA’s rationale is that the restructuring was voluntary — if you want to continue to hold unrestructured Greek debt, you can. Nevertheless, many bondholders will have a financial experience equivalent to a default; they will take a writedown on their debt, accept lower coupons, and have a guaranteed principal payment.
Probably a goal of the rescue was to avoid creating a credit event. There were fears that an official Greek default would cause CDS sellers to fail (remember AIG?), in which case CDS buyers (such as banks) who thought they had hedged their Greek government bond positions would not have been hedged, and this could have caused a cascade of failures. It’s hard to know if this was a plausible scenario, but this time at any rate, we won’t have to find out.
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