REPORTERNET.COM

European Central Bank communication was not at its most brilliant ahead of this week’s deal on a second bail-out for Greece.

Nothing has been said formally about the bond swaps, which will circumvent forced losses on Greek government bonds acquired as part of its eurozone crisis-fighting measures or by individual eurozone central banks for their investment portfolios. We still do not know, officially, the size of those holdings.
The result has been a lot of misinformation. One commonly held assumption is that some of the eurozone’s monetary institutions had worrying levels of exposure – for instance Cyprus’s central bank. In fact, the amount of Greek bonds it holds are much lower, I have been told by someone who has seen its figures.
According to this account, the Cypriot central bank holds Greek government bonds with a book value of about €50m and a nominal value of just over €70m. Even if the central bank had accepted the losses being demanded of other bond holders under the private sector involvement part of the Greek bail-out, its losses would have been of the order of about €20m or €25m – roughly equivalent only to about half the profit earned by the central bank in 2010.


(source: www.ft.com)