Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. David Doyle:
It is not on the system. But I've no problem giving it over to you:
I believe it's important to include dated subordinated debt under the guarantee as the problems we are dealing with here were caused by the financial institutions having too great a mismatch between their assets and liability profiles to such an extent that they were funding long-term assets with too much reliance on short-term funding, be it commercial paper, interbank deposits and corporate deposits. Surely the objective of the guarantee of this dated subordinated debt from our point of view is to give the covered institutions the ability to access at least two-year term funding to reduce their reliance on short-term funding, thereby avoiding the liquidity squeeze. If any covered institution was to issue term debt with a maturity longer than two years, then the market would want to be compensated for that by an appropriate step up in the interest rate pricing. The investors in dated subordinated debt, while receiving a reasonable return commensurate with the risk, are not equity-type investors and invest on the basis that they expect their original principal to be returned at maturity whereas equity investors take the risk of losing their equity, but also with the very real possibility of receiving a multiple of their equity investment through dividend income and capital appreciation, in theory.
So that was the, that was the raison d'êtreI saw on the documentation after the event. The first time I, I recall seeing anything about it was in that Merrill Lynch document. And, as it turned out, a lot of that subordinated debt was taken out through liability management exercises.
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