ECB Prepares To Sacrifice Greek Banks With 50% Collateral Haircut

In what seems like a coincidental retaliation for Greece's pivot to Russia (and following Greece's initiation of capital controls), the supposedly independent European Central Bank has decided suddenly that - after dishing out €74 billion of emergency liquidity to the Greek National Bank to fund its banks - as The NY Times reports, the value of the collateral that Greek banks post at their own central bank to secure these loans be reduced by as much as 50%, and the haircut should increase if negotiations with Europe remain at an impasse. As we detailed earlier, this is about as worst-case-scenario for Greece as is 'diplomatically' possible currently, and highlights an increasingly hard line by The ECB toward The Greeks as the move will leave banks hard-pressed to survive.

As we laid out earlier, according to Bloomberg, the ECB staff proposal lays out three options to reduce central-bank risk: "the scenarios envisage returning haircuts to the level before late last year, when the ECB eased its collateral requirements for Greece; to set them at 75 percent; or to set them at 90 percent. The latter two options could be applied if Greece is in an “orderly default” under a formal ECB program or a “disorderly default,” CNBC said, without further elaborating on those terms."

Any reduction in ELA availability would be devastating to Greece, where depositors continue to pull cash from banks accounts to the tune of several hundred million euro every week, and the central bank "seeks to match the outflow with ELA. The Bank of Greece keeps a buffer of around 3 billion euros of ELA allowance in reserve, to give it time to react to a possible bank run, one of the officials said."

Any reduction in this buffer would lead to a self-fulfilling bank run prophecy and accelerate the deposit flight to the point where the local banks are forced to halt operations, and Greece is forced to replace the "soft" capital controls already rolled out with "hard" ones.

To restrict or veto ELA funding, which is provided at the Greek central bank’s own risk with consent from Frankfurt, a two-thirds majority of the Governing Council is necessary. A growing minority is opposed to continuing to provide the assistance indefinitely, one of the people said.

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