As the dust settles attention is now focusing on the detail of the scheme and what exactly the ECB will buy.
The bare facts are these: from March the ECB will become a substantial player in bond markets, buying €60bn of assets a month until at least September 2016, longer if inflation does not rise.
This figure includes the ECB’s existing purchases of banks’ covered bonds and asset-backed securities, which means government and European institution bond purchases from secondary markets could be closer to €50bn a month — a total of just under €1tn.
Most of this will consist of sovereign debt issued by countries in the eurozone, which totals about €5tn if short-term Treasury bills are included, €4.6tn if not, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Of this, only €3.9tn is in the two-30 year maturity bracket that the ECB will look at.
“The bottom line is that the ECB will fairly quickly own 20 per cent of all two-30 year government bonds,” says Mike Riddell at M&G Investments.
There are further details to be aware of. Inflation-linked bonds will be included in the programme, as will negative-yielding bonds, and 12 per cent of the total will consist of supranational bonds, issued by organisations such as the European Financial Stability Facility, which total €420bn according to research by RBS. Agency bonds and those issued by regions add up to a further €600bn.
Not every country will see the same amount of debt purchased, either. Instead, the ECB is using “capital keys” reflecting the economic and demographic weight of eurozone member nations. This favours large, core countries over the more indebted peripheral countries, says Frederik Ducrozet, eurozone economist at Crédit Agricole.
Number crunching by Deutsche Bank shows €205bn of German debt could be bought, compared to just €18bn of Portuguese debt. Debt of countries still in bailout programmes, such as Greece, can only be included if they comply with programme conditions and does not exceed a cap of 33 per cent of debt issuance. The cap means Greece will only be eligible once it repays debt due to mature in July.
The success of the scheme will also depend on the way that sellers behave.
© Financial Times
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