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PART I: PRELIMINARY

MI by 2002
MI by 2002

Comparisons

The 1987 ISDA, being concerned only with interest rates and currency exchange, does not contemplate delivery, as such. Delivery implies non-cash assets. Therefore portions of 2(a)(i) and 2(a)(ii) were augmented in the 1992 ISDA to cater for this contingency. The 1992 ISDA also added a condition precedent to the flawed asset clause (Section 2(a)(iii)) that no Early Termination Date had been designated.

Thereafter Section 2(a) is identical in the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA. However the subsidiary definition of Scheduled Settlement Date — a date in which any Section 2(a)(i) obligations fall due — is a new and frankly uncalled-for innovation in the 2002 ISDA.

We have a special page dedicated to Section 2(a)(iii), by the way. That is a brute, and one of the most litigationey parts of the Agreement.

Summary

Section 2 contains the basic nuts and bolts of your obligations under the Transactions you execute. Pay or deliver what you’ve promised to pay or deliver, when you’ve promised to pay it or deliver it, and all will be well.

“Scheduled Settlement Date”

Though it doesn’t say so, at least in the 2002 ISDA the date on which you are obliged to pay or deliver an amount is the “Scheduled Settlement Date”. The ’02 definition only shows up only in Section 2(b) (relating to the time by which you must have notified any change of account details) and then, later, in the tax-related Termination Events (Tax Event and Tax Event Upon Merger). That said, “Scheduled Settlement Date” isn’t defined at all in the 1992 ISDA.

Section 2(a)(iii): the flawed asset provision

And then there’s the mighty flawed asset provision of Section 2(a)(iii). This won’t trouble ISDA negotiators on the way into a swap trading relationship — few enough people understand it sufficiently well to argue about it — but if, as it surely will, the great day of judgment should visit upon the financial markets again some time in the future, expect plenty of tasty argument, between highly-paid King’s Counsel who have spent exactly none of their careers considering derivative contracts, about what it means.

We have some thoughts on that topic, should you be interested, at Section 2(a)(iii).

Flawed assets

Section 2(a)(iii): Of these provisions, the one that generates the most controversy (chiefly among academics and scholars, it must be said) is Section 2(a)(iii). It generates a lot less debate between negotiators, precisely because its legal effect is nuanced, so its terms are more or less inviolate. Thus, should your counterparty take a pen to Section 2(a)(iii), a clinching argument against that inclination is “just don’t go there, girlfriend”.

Payments and deliveries

In a rare case of leaving things to practitioners’ common sense, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ deigned not to say what it meant by “payment” or “delivery”.

Payments

Payments are straightforward enough, we suppose — especially since they are stipulated to be made in “freely transferable funds and in the manner customary for payments in the required currency”: beyond that, money being money, you either pay or you don’t: there are not too many shades of meaning left for legal eagles to snuggle into.

Deliveries

Deliveries, though, open up more scope for confecting doubts one can then set about avoiding. what does it mean to deliver? What of assets in which another actor might have some claim, title or colour of interest? In financing documents you might expect at least a representation that “the delivering party beneficially owns and has absolute rights to deliver any required assets free from any competing interests other than customary liens and those arising under security documents”.

What better cue could there be for opposing combatants leap into their trenches, and thrash out this kind of language?

Less patient types — like yours truly — might wish to read all of that into the still, small voice of calm of the word “deliver” in the first place.

What else could it realistically mean, but to deliver outright, and free of competing claims? It is bound up with implications about what you are delivering, and whose the thing is that you are delivering. It would be absurd to suppose one could discharge a physical delivery obligation under a swap by “delivering” an item to which one had no title at all: it is surely implicit in the commercial rationale that one is transferring, outright, the value implicit in an asset and not just the formal husk of the asset itself, on terms that it may be whisked away at any moment at the whim of a bystander.

Swaps are exchanges in value, not pantomimes: one surrenders the value of the asset for whatever value one’s counterparty has agreed to provide in return. Delivery is not just some kind of performative exercise in virtue signalling. You have to give up what you got. As the bailiffs take leave of your counterparty with the asset you gave it strapped to their wagon, it would hardly do to say, “oh, well, I did deliver you that asset: it never said anywhere it had to be my asset, or that I was meant to be transferring any legal interest in it to you. It is all about my act of delivery, I handed something to you, and that is that.”

We think one could read that into the question of whether a delivery has been made at all. Should a third party assert title to or some claim over an asset delivered to you, your best tactic is not a vain appeal to representations your counterparty as to the terms of delivery, but to deny that it has “delivered” anything at all. “I was meant to have the asset. This chap has repossessed it; therefore I do not have it. If I don’t have it, it follows that you have failed to deliver it.”

Modern security as practical control

In any weather, nowadays much of this is made moot by the realities of how financial assets are transferred: that is, electronically, fungibly, in book-entry systems, and therefore, by definition, freely: a creditor takes security over accounts to which assets for the time being are credited, or by way of physical pledge where the surety resides in the pledgee holding and therefore controlling the securities for itself. It is presumed that, to come about, any transfer of assets naturally comes electronically and without strings attached. It would be difficult for such a security holder to mount a claim for an asset transferred electronically to a bona fide third party recipient for value and without notice: the practicalities of its security interest lie in its control over the asset in the first place: holding it, or at the least being entitled to stop a third party security trustee or escrow custodian delivering away the asset without the security holder’s prior consent.

Comparisons

But for the new definition of Scheduled Settlement Date in the 2002 ISDA, the 1992 ISDA text is formally the same.

Summary

ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ phoning it in, we are obliged to say, and not minded to make any better a job of it when given the opportunity to in 2002. On the other hand, in this time of constant change, it is reassuring to know some things just stay the same.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 2(b)

Comparisons

The 2002 ISDA introduces the concept of Multiple Transaction Payment Netting, thereby correcting a curiously backward way of applying settlement netting.

Summary

Section 2(c) is about “settlement” or “payment” netting — that is, the operational settlement of offsetting payments due on any day under the normal operation of the Agreement — and not the more drastic close-out netting, which is the Early Termination of all Transactions under Section 6.

If you want to know more about close-out netting, see Single Agreement and Early Termination Amount.

We wonder what the point of this section is, since settlement netting is a factual operational process for performing existing legal obligations, rather than any kind of variation of the parties’ rights and obligations. If you owe me ten pounds and I owe you ten pounds, and we agree to both keep our tenners, what cause of action arises? What loss is there? We have settled our existing obligations differently.

To be sure, if I pay you your tenner and you don’t pay me mine, that’s a different story — but then there is no settlement netting at all. The only time one would wish to enforce settlement netting it must, ipso facto, have happened, so what do you think you’re going to court to enforce?

Transaction flows and collateral flows

In a fully margined ISDA Master Agreement, all other things being equal, the termination of a Transaction will lead to two equal and opposite effects:

• A final payment or exchange under the Transaction having a value more or less equal to the present value of that Transaction;
• A offsetting change in the Exposure under the CSA in exactly the same value.

The strict sequence of these payments ought to be that the Transaction termination payment goes first, and the collateral return follows, since it can only really be calculated and called once the termination payment has been made.

I know what you’re thinking. Hang on! that means the termination payer pays knowing this will increase its Exposure for the couple of days it will take for that collateral return to find its way back. That’s stupid!

What with the regulators’ obsession minimise systemic counterparty credit risk, wouldn’t it be better to apply some kind of settlement netting in anticipation, to keep the credit exposure down?

Now, dear reader, have you learned nothing? It might be better, but “better” is not how ISDA documentation rolls. The theory of the ISDA and CSA settlement flows puts the Transaction payment egg before the variation margin chicken so, at the moment, Transaction flows and collateral flows tend to be handled by different operations teams, and their systems don’t talk. Currently, the payer of a terminating transaction has its heart in its mouth for a day or so.

Industry efforts to date have been targeting at shortening the period between the Exposure calculation and the final payment of the collateral transfer.

Comparisons

Other than an “on or after the date on which” embellishment towards the end of the clause, exactly the same text in the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA.

Summary

Section 2(d) does the following:

• Net obligation: if a counterparty suffers withholding it generally doesn’t have to gross up – it just remits tax to the revenue and pays net.
• Refund obligation where tax subsequently levied: if a counterparty pays gross and subsequently is levied the tax, the recipient must refund an equivalent amount to the tax.
• Indemnifiable Tax: the one exception is “Indemnifiable Tax” - this is tax arises as a result of the payer’s own status vis-à-vis the withholding jurisdiction. In that case the payer has to gross up, courtesy of a magnificent quintuple negative.

Stamp Tax reimbursement obligations are covered at 4(e), not here.

News from the pedantry front

Happy news, readers: we have a report from the front lines in the battle between substance and form. The JC asked no lesser a tax ninja than Dan Neidle — quietly, the JC is a bit of a fan — the following question:

In the statement, “X may make a deduction or withholding from any payment for or on account of any tax” is there any difference between “deducting” and “withholding”?

They seem to be exact synonyms.

Likewise, “for” vs. “on account of”?

We are pleased to report Mr N opined replied:

I don’t think there’s a difference. Arguably it’s done for clarity, because people normally say “withholding tax” but technically there’s no such thing — it’s a deduction of income tax.

Which is good enough for me. So all of that “shall be entitled to make a deduction or withholding from any payment which it makes pursuant to this agreement for or on account of any Tax” can be scattered to the four winds. Henceforth the JC is going with:

X may deduct Tax from any payment it makes under this Agreement.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 2(d)

Details

MI by 2002

Comparisons

The Section 3(a) Basic Representations survived intact, to the last punctuation mark, between the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA. They were that excellent.

Summary

An observant negotiator (is there any other kind?) handling a 1992 ISDA might wish to add a new agency rep as Section 3(a)(vi). In 2002, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ obviously thought this was such a good idea that they added a brand-new “no-agency” rep to the 2002 ISDA, only they can’t have felt it was basic enough to go in the Basic Representations, so they put it in a new clause all by itself at Section 3(g).

But you don’t need a bespoke “no-agency” rep if you’re on a 2002 ISDA, if that’s what you’re wondering.

3(a)(v) Obligations Binding

“any Credit Support Document to which it is a party”: Business at the front; party at the back.

Now given that a Credit Support Document will generally be a deed of guarantee, letter of credit or some other third party form of credit assurance from a, you know, third party to which a Party in whose favour it is provided will not be a “party” — and no, an 1995 CSA is not a Credit Support Document, however much it might sound like one, one might wonder what the point would be of mentioning, in this sub-section, Credit Support Documents to which a Party is party.

Well — and this might come as a surprise if you’re an ISDA ingénue; old lags won’t bat an eyelid — there isn’t much point.

But does anyone, other than the most insufferable pedant, really care? I mean why would you write a snippy wiki article about some fluffy but fundamentally harmless language unless you were a stone-cold bore?

Hang on: Why are you looking at me like that?

Comparisons

No change from 1992 ISDA to 2002 ISDA.

Summary

Can you understand the rationale for this representation? Sure.

Does it do any practical good? No.

It is a warranty, not a representation

A standard, but useless, contractual warranty. It can’t be a pre-contractual representation, of course, because the very idea of an “event of default” depends for its intellectual existence on the conclusion of the contract in which it is embedded. So, it won’t really do to argue there should be no contract, on grounds of the false representation that a contract that does not exist has not been breached.

It is paradoxes all the way down

A No EOD rep is a classic loo paper rep: soft, durable, comfy, absorbent — super cute when a wee Labrador pub grabs one end of the streamer and charges round your Italian sunken garden with it — but as a credit mitigant or a genuine contractual protection, only good for wiping your behind on.

Bear in mind you are asking someone — on pain of them being found in fundamental breach of contract — to swear to you they are not already in fundamental breach of contract. Now, how much comfort can you genuinely draw from such promise? Wouldn’t it be better if your credit team did some cursory due diligence to establish, independently of the say-so of the prisoner in question, whether there are grounds to suppose it might be in fundamental breach of contract?

Presuming there are not — folks tend not to publicise their own defaults on private contracts, after all — the real question here is, “do I trust my counterparty?” And to that question, any answer provided by the person whose trustworthiness is in question, carries exactly no informational value. All cretins are liars.

So, let’s say it turns out your counterparty is lying; there is a pending private event of default it knew about and you didn’t. Now what are you going to do? Righteously detonate your contract on account of something of which by definition you are ignorant?

Have fun, counsellor.

“...or potential event of default”

Adding potential events of default is onerous, especially if it is a continuous representation, as it deprives the representor of grace periods it has carefully negotiated into its other payment obligations. Yes, it is in the ISDA Master Agreement.

“... or would occur as a result of entering into this agreement”

A curious confection, you might think: what sort of event of default could a fellow trigger merely by entering into an ISDA Master Agreement with me? Well, remember the ISDA’s lineage. It was crafted, before the alliance of men and elves, by the Children of the Woods. They were a species of pre-derivative, banking people. It is possible they had in mind the sort of restrictive covenants a banker might demand of a borrower with a look of softness about its credit standing: perhaps a promise not to create material indebtedness to another lender, though in these enlightened times that would be a great constriction indeed on a fledgling enterprise chasing the world of opportunity that lies beyond its door.

So, does a swap mark-to-market exposure count as indebtedness? Many will recognise this tedious question as one addressed at great length when contemplating a Cross Default: Suffice, here, to say that an ISDA isn’t “borrowed money” as such, but a material swap exposure would have the same credit characteristics as indebtedness. But in these days of compulsory variation margin you wouldn’t expect one’s mark-to-market exposure to be material, unless something truly cataclysmic was going on intra-day in the markets.

Much more likely is a negative pledge, and while an unsecured, title-transfer, close-out netted ISDA might not offend one of those, a Pledge GMSLA might, and a prime brokerage agreement may well do.

But still, nonetheless, see above: if it does, and your counterparty has fibbed about it, all you can do is get out your tiny violin.

Comparisons

Section 3(c) was one of the bits of the 1992 ISDA that ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ “got mostly right” at the first time of asking. But still, some bright sparks on the ’Squad took it upon themselves, in the 2002 ISDA, to switch out reference to “Affiliates” which — I don’t know, might take in some distant half-bred cousin you don’t enormously care about and who doesn’t cast any real shadow on your creditworthiness — with “Credit Support Providers” and “Specified Entities” who no doubt more keenly do, but this leads to just more fiddliness in the Schedule over-stuffed with fiddliness, since one must then go to the trouble of specifying, and then arguing with your counterparties about, who should count as a Specified Entity for this remote and rather vacuous purpose.

Keeps the home fires burning in the hobbity shires where ISDA negotiators make their homes, we suppose.

Summary

Reference to Affiliates can be controversial, particularly for hedge fund managers.

More generally, absence of litigation is a roundly pointless representation, but seeing as (other than unaffiliated hedge fund managers) no-one complains about it, it is best to just leave well alone.

Absence of litigation generally

An absence of litigation representation seeks to address litigation carrying two particular risks:

• Enforceability: Litigation that could somehow undermine or prejudice the very enforceability of life was we know it (a.k.a the agreement you are presently negotiating);
• Credit deterioration: Litigation that is so monstrous in scope that it threatens to wipe your counterparty from the face of the earth altogether, while it still owes you under the agreement you’re negotiating.

Enforceability-threatening litigation

Firstly, Earth to Planet ISDA: what kind of litigation or regulatory action — we presume about something unrelated to this agreement since, by your theory, it doesn’t damn well exist yet — could adversely impact in the enforceability of this future private legal contract between one of the litigants and an unrelated, and ignorant, third party?

Search me. But still, I rest assured there will an ISDA boxwallah out there somewhere who could think of something.

Existentially apocalyptic litigation

Look, if your counterparty is banged up in court proceedings so awful to behold that an adverse finding might bankrupt it altogether, and your credit sanctioning team hasn’t got wind of it independently then, friend, you have way, way bigger problems than whether you have this feeble covenant in your docs. And, if you are only catching it at all thanks to a carelessly given absence of litigation rep, by the time said litigation makes itself known to you. won’t it be a bit late?

Deemed repetition

Ah, you might say, but what about the deemed repetition of this representation? Doesn’t that change everything?

Deemed repetition

What of this idea that one not only represents and warrants as of the moment one inks the paper, but also is deemed to repeat itself an the execution of each trade, on any day, or whenever a butterfly flaps its wings on Fitzcarraldo’s steamer? Do we think it works? Do we? Given how practically useless even explicit representations are, does it really matter?

And, having given it, how are you supposed to stop a continuing representation once it has marched off into the unknowable future, like one of those conjured brooms from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice? If you don’t stop it, what then? This may seem fanciful to you, but what are buyside lawyers if not creatures of unlimited, gruesome imagination? Are their dreams not full with flights of just this sort of fancy? Rest assured that, as you do, they will be chewing their nails to the quick in insomniac fever about this precise contingency.

For which reason — it being a faintly pointless representation in the first place and everything — it might be best just to concede this point when it arises, as inevitably it will.

Pick your battles

All that said, and probably for all of the above reasons, parties tend not to care less about this representation, so your practical course is most likely to leave it where you find it.

Comparisons

ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ must have got this spot-on in their first attempt in 1992, because their successors in 2002 could not find so much as an inverted comma to change.

Summary

The fabulous Section 3(d) representation, giving one’s counterparty the right to close out should any so-designated representations turn out not to be true. This is sure to occupy an inordinate amount of your negotiation time — in that it occupies any time at all — because you are as likely to be hit in the face by a live starfish in the Gobi Desert as you are to close out an ISDA Master Agreement because your counterparty is late in preparing its annual accounts. But that’s a personal view and you may not rely on it.

The 3(d) representation, in the documents for delivery table in the Schedule, therefore covers only the accuracy and completeness of Specified Information and not (for example) whether Specified Information is delivered at all. For that, see Section 4(a) - Furnish Specified Information.

“Covered by the Section 3(d) Representation”

If one is required to “furnish” Specified Information under Section 4, two things can go wrong:

No show: One can fail to provide it, at all, in which case there is a Breach of Agreement, but be warned: the period before one can enforce such a failure, judged by the yardstick of modern financial contracts, is long enough for a whole kingdom of dinosaurs to evolve and be wiped out; or

It’s cobblers: One can provide the Specified Information, on time, but it can be a total pile of horse ordure. Now, here is a trick for young players: if your Specified Information is, or turns out to be, false, you have no remedy unless you have designated that it is “subject to the Section 3(d) representation”. That is the one that promises it is accurate and not misleading.

Might Section 3(d) not cover a representation?

Now you might ask what good an item of Specified Information can possibly be, if Section 3(d) didn’t apply and it could be just made up on the spot without fear of retribution — as a youngster, the JC certainly asked that question, and has repeated it over many years, and is yet to hear a good answer — but all we can presume is that in its tireless quest to cater for the unguessable predilections of the negotiating community, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ left this preposterous option open just in case. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Legal opinions, and Credit Support Documents

A trawl through the SEC’s “Edgar” archive reveals that the sorts of things to which “Covered by Section 3(d) Representation” results in a “No” outcome are rare — but not non-existent. It is things like “Legal opinion from counsel concerning due authorization, enforceability and related matters, addressed to the other party and reasonably acceptable to such other party”, or “Credit Support Documents”.
See further discussion in the sections below.

Annual reports

The other little fiddle — and it is a little fidgety fiddle — is to remark of annual reports that, yes, they are covered by that Section 3(d) representation, but with a proviso:

“Yes; provided that the phrase “is, as of the date of the information, true, accurate and complete in every material respect” in Section 3(d) shall be deleted and the phrase “fairly presents, in all material respects, the financial condition and results of operations as of their respective dates and for the respective periods covered thereby” shall be inserted in lieu thereof.”

More on “covered by the Section 3(d) Representation”

We went digging a little deeper. These are the only examples we could find before we got bored looking. In each case we are not persuaded these caveats accommodate anyone other than our value-adding learned friends:

Legal opinions

Should a legal opinion issued by a third party who is not party to the agreement, or even affiliated with it, have to be true in the Section 3(d) sense?

The predictable response is for the counterparty to say, “look: I’m not a lawyer, okay, so it can hardly be on me if the legal advice I get in good faith happens to be wrong?” We suppose this is excluded because the Party to the ISDA is not the author of the legal opinion, nor professionally competent to pass on its contents (hence the need for the legal opinion in the first place), so should hardly be expected to be held to account for it.

This may be expressed to you, dissonantly, in the honeyed prose of a private practice lawyer — a vernacular foreign to most ISDA negotiators. You may wonder whether it has not been disingenuously spoon-fed to your counterpart by just such a fellow. We will not speculate. But we will observe that, while it may seem compelling at first, it is bad logic. It presumes that what matters is the probity with which a counterparty conducts itself; that it acts in good faith and with a benign disposition; that its “good chapness” —the basic honesty it shows when dealing with its market counterparties — is beyond reproach.

But this, we submit, is to misunderstand in a profound way the point of a commercial contract. There are no ethicists in a foxhole. Unlike criminal or even tort law, the law of contract is not an instrument of moral judgment. It cares only about economics: that one does, or does not, do what one has promised or — as in this case — that what one has represented to you is, or is not, true. The law of contract is broadly incurious about why.

What matters is the economic consequence of a falsity — the actus reus, not one’s mens rea. The object of a legal opinion is to confirm the accuracy of a legal representation. Instead of simply representing that, for example, you have the regulatory permission to act as a swap dealer, you have a legal opinion to confirms that fact, from one who should know.

Now, if I have engaged in a trading arrangement with you on the presumption that you are appropriately permissioned, licenced, and constitutionally able to enter into valid and binding swap contracts, and you satisfy my qualms by proffering the legal opinion of some respectable attorney-about-town you have found who will say it is so, and that attorney turns out to be wrong, my commercial position is no less parlous just because you weren’t to know your legal advisor was a clot. Regardless of whose fault it was, or how egregious was her negligence in being at fault, if the required regulatory permission does not exist, the comfort I seek is misplaced. I now have a portfolio of swaps which may not be enforceable. My claims may be suspended at any minute.

I want out before that can happen. I might wish you well, and bitterly regret it were not otherwise, but it is not otherwise. I need out. If that causes you some embarrassment, inconvenience or financial loss, then the person to whom you should look for redress is your lawyer.

Not for the first time, the “market standard,” for no reason other than it is a legal question and there is no-one else around qualified to gainsay it, is crafted to suit the personal interests of the opining legal community. Have no truck with this, fellows.

Credit Support Documents

We imagine here the perceived fear is that a Credit Support Document, being an executed legal contract, does not have a truth or falsity independent of itself the bargain it represents and evidences, so cannot really be a misrepresentation. But in a funny sense a legal contract constitutes the agreement it evidences: sure; the legal accord is an immaterial, intellectual thing, a consensus ad idem that inhabits the incarcerated space that separates us, and it cannot be fully delimited by mortal, combustible paper. But all the same, its written form can hardly contradict it. If the written agreement incontrovertibly says “I must go up” our legal compact can hardly require me to go down; the paper format surely constrains what one can take from, or give to, a contract.

That being the case, there is not really a meaningful sense in which a contract can “misrepresent” the actual accord it represents. or be “false”. There is something faintly, but elusively, paradoxical about this.

What might happen is that a counterparty submits a form that has been superseded, or terminated and thus is but a husk of an ex-contract; one that once existed but now does not. Alternatively, a truly mendacious counterparty might offer up a form that is not really a contract, or even evidence of one, at all: a forgery, or a fraud.

But in those cases, the operating cause of the falsehood is the party submitting the document, not the document offered by way of representation itself, and in each an innocent party is better protected if Section 3(d) Representation does apply.

Audited financial statements

Your adversary may try to crowbar in something like this, to satisfy her yen to make a difference and please her clients with her acumen and commercial fortitude:

“or, in the case of financial information, a fair representation of the financial condition of the relevant party, provided that the other party may rely on any such information when determining whether an Additional Termination Event has occurred.”

This is predicated on the following reasoning: “In publishing the audit, the auditor itself is not making any greater representation than that the statements are a fair representation of the financial conditions. I’m no accountant. I didn’t even write the stupid audit. How am I supposed to know? Why should I give any representation about the content of the audit at all, let alone a stronger representation than the expert? I am not underwriting the work of some bean-counter at Deloitte.”

Fair questions, but they misapprehend what is being asked. The riposte is this: The Part 3 information you must supply is “Party B’s annual audited financial statements.” So the representation we are after is that you have handed over a fair, accurate and complete copy of those audited statements, not that the statements themselves, as prepared by the auditor, are necessarily fair, accurate and complete. To get that comfort, we have the auditor’s own representation of the company’s financial condition, and we don’t need yours.

Details

Not providing documents for delivery is an Event of Default ... eventually

The importance of promptly sending required documents for delivery goes as follows:

• By dint of Section 4(a) you agree to furnish each other Specified Information set out in Part 3 of the Schedule.
• By dint of Section 5(a)(ii) if you don’t then that can be a Breach of Agreement Event of Default (Section 5(a)(ii)). Be warned: you must pursue a tortured chain of nested double negatives and carefully parse the interplay between Sections 4(a) and 5(a)(ii) to grasp this, but it is true.
• But, Section 5(a)(ii) imposes a thirty freaking day grace period following notice before a Breach of Agreement counts as an Event of Default allowing termination. (A Failure to Pay or Deliver is excluded from that definition, by the way, because it has its own EOD with a much tighter grace period).
• So if you need a document “furnished” urgently and can’t wait a month for it (you might not, if you are a credit officer and it is a monthly NAV statement, for example) then you must upgrade a simple 5(a)(ii) Breach of Agreement to a full-blown Additional Termination Event.
  

Comparisons

No change between Section 3(e) of the 1992 ISDA and Section 3(e) of the 2002 ISDA. To be fair, what’s there to change?

Summary

You’ll find the usual form of the Payer Tax Representations in Part 2(a) of the Schedule. They aren’t usually amended.

Withholding under the ISDA

TL;DR: The basic rationale is this:

• if the tax relates to the underlying instrument, rather than the Payer’s residence or tax status, the Payer does not have to gross up.
• if the tax relates to the Payer’s residence or tax status, then the Payer does have to gross up unless the Payee should have provided information to the Payer which would have entitled the Payer to avoid the tax.
• if you’ve agreed the FATCA Amendment, the Payer doesn’t have to gross up any FATCA Withholding Taxes.

The combination of the Payer Tax Representations and the Gross-Up clause of the ISDA Master Agreement has the following effect:

• Section 3(e): I promise you that I do not have to withhold on my payments to you (as long as all your Payee Tax Representations are correct and you have, under Section 4(a), given me everything I need to pay free of withholding);
• Section 2(d): I will not withhold on any payments to you. Unless I am required to by law. Which I kind of told you I wasn’t... If I have to withhold, I'll pay the tax the authorities and give you the receipt. If I only had to withhold because of my connection to the taxing jurisdiction (that is, if the withholding is an Indemnifiable Tax), I’ll gross you up. (You should look at the drafting of Indemnifiable Tax, by the way. It's quite a marvel). ...
• Gross-Up: Unless the tax could have been avoided if the Payee had taken made all its 3(f) representations, delivered all its 4(a) material, or had its 3(f) representations been, like, true).
• Stamp Tax is a whole other thing.
• As is FATCA, which (as long as you’ve made your FATCA Amendment or signed up to a FATCA Protocol, provides that FATCA Withholding Taxes are excluded from the Section 3(e) Payer Tax Representations, and also from the definition of Indemnifiable Tax. Meaning one doesn't have to rep, or gross up, FATCA payments.
  

Comparisons

No change between the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA.

Summary

US Payee Tax Representations

The required Payee Tax Representations depend on the nature of the Counterparty.

• US Person: Counterparty is a “U.S. person” for the purposes of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as amended.
• US Corporation: It is classified as a US Corporation for United States federal income tax purposes.
• Foreign Person: It is a “foreign person” for United States federal income tax purposes.
• Non-US Branch of Foreign Person: Each branch is a non-US branch of a foreign person for US federal income tax purposes
• Non-Withholding Partnership:It is classified as a “non-withholding foreign partnership” for United States federal income tax purposes.
• Connected Payments: Each payment received or to be received by it under this Agreement will be effectively connected with its conduct of a trade or business within the United States.
• Non-Connected Payments: Each such payment received or to be received by it in connection with this Agreement will not be effectively connected with its conduct of a trade or business in the United States
• Tax Treaty Benefits: It is fully eligible for the benefits of the “Business Profits” or “Industrial and Commercial Profits” provision, the “Interest” provision or any “Other Income” provision of the Income Tax Convention between the United States and Counterparty’s Jurisdiction* with respect to any payment described in such provisions and received or to be received by it in connection with this Agreement and no such payment is attributable to a trade or business carried on by it through a permanent establishment in the United States.
• Public International Organisation: It is a public international organization that enjoys the privileges, exemptions and immunities as an international organization under the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288-288f).
• Withholding and Reporting: It will assume withholding and reporting for any payments (or portions of any payments) determined to be non-Effectively Connected income for United States federal income tax purposes.
• Monetary Policy: Its primary purpose for entering into this Agreement is to implement or effectuate its governmental, financial or monetary policy.
  

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 3(f)

Details

MI by 2002

PART II: SECTION 5 DEFAULT AND EARLY TERMINATION

MI by 2002

Comparisons

The significant change between 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA is the restriction of that grace period from three Local Business Days to one. And a bit of convolutional frippery in introducing Local Delivery Days as well.

Compare also Failure to Pay under the 2014 ISDA Credit Derivatives Definitions, which is subtly different given the different purpose that it plays under a CDS.

Summary

Failure to Pay or Deliver under Section 5(a)(i) of the ISDA Master Agreement: where a party fails to pay or deliver on time and does not remedy before the grace period expires. The grace period for a 2002 ISDA is one Local Business Day; shorter than the three Local Business Days in the 1992 ISDA. This fact alone has kept a number of market counterparties on the 1992 form, nearly thirty years after it was upgraded.

There’s a technical funny due to the American habit of insisting on a pledge-only 1994 NY CSA and then designating it as a Credit Support Document (against the hopes and dreams of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ when it drafted the Users’ Guide, but still), and that is a failure to pay under an English law CSA is a Section 5(a)(i) Failure to Pay or Deliver, whereas a failure to pay under a New York Law CSA is a Section 5(a)(iii) Credit Support Default. Doth any difference it maketh? None, so far as we can see.

Funny old world we live in.

General discussion

There is an inverse relationship between the amount of time you will spend negotiating a point in an ISDA Master Agreement and the practical difference it will make once your ISDA Master Agreement has been inked and stuffed in a filing cabinet in a cleaning cupboard behind the lavatories electronically stored, data-enriched, in a comprehensive online legal data repository.

Comparisons

Redlines

• 1987 ⇒ 1992: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1992 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’02 vs. the ’92: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1987 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)

---

Discussion

Note the addition of Repudiation of Agreement to the 2002 ISDA. Common law purists like the JC will grumble that you don’t really need to set out repudiation as a breach justifying termination of a contract, because that’s what it is by definition but stating the bleeding obvious has never stopped ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ before. Also, an interesting question: if you do feel the need to provide for what is in essence an evolving common law remedy, then, to the extent your draw that remedy inside the cope of the common law remedy — or the common law evolves some new different and remedy that no-one had thought of before — then what? Section 9(d) has you covered. Woo-hoo.

Summary

A failure to perform any agreement, if not cured within 30 days, is an Event of Default, except for those failures which already have their own special Event of Default (i.e., Failure to Pay or Deliver, under Section 5(a)(i)), those that relate to a pre-existing default (for example, default interest on unpaid amounts) and those that only bear on the “defaulting” party’s tax position, meaning that non-performance is punishment enough in itself (and does not affect the “non-defaulting” party) — that is, the non-compliant party will just get clipped for tax it could have avoided had it performed.

These are the boring breaches of agreement: those of a not immediately existential consequence to a derivative relationship (like Failure to Pay or Deliver, or a party’s outright Bankruptcy), which are not therefore hugely time critical, but which, if not promptly sorted out, justify shutting things down with extreme prejudice. Note that, while the 2002 truncates a bunch of other grace periods in the agreement (notably for a Failure to Pay or Deliver, and for discharging a Bankruptcy petition) it does not truncate the grace period for “boring” defaults, which stays at the glacially long 30 days.

All rendered in ISDA’s crack drafting squad™’s lovingly tortured prose, of course: note a double negative extragvaganza in 5(a)(ii)(1): not complying with an obligation that is not (inter alia) a payment obligation if not remedied within a month. High five, team ISDA.

Repudiation

New in the 2002 ISDA: repudiation of contract. Not actually breaching it, per se, but high-handedly saying that you are going to. In writing. Could you argue that by codifying that a repudiation must be in writing to count, in a counter-intuitive way this new clause dilutes the common law rules, rather than reinforcing them? A common law repudiation can, if clear enough, be oral, by conduct, body language, morse code, semaphore and so on,

So rather than empowering a Non-defaulting Party, the addition of a narrow definition of what counts as repudiation makes their avenue of redress that teeny bit narrower. Doubtful it has ever made a difference, but — well, they said that about LIBOR didn’t they?

Note that unlike Breach of Agreement, there is no grace period to cure a Repudiation of Agreement: If you say the magic words in writing and cast the spell The death eaters will come and take your ISDA away at once, as surely as if you had failed to pay — sooner indeed: even there there is a short grace period.

Hierarchy of Events

Note that a normal Section 5(a)(ii)(1) Breach of Agreement that also amounts to a Section 5(b)(i) Illegality or a Section 5(b)(ii) Force Majeure Termination Event will, thanks to section 5(c), be treated as the latter, but a repudiatory Breach of Agreement under section 5(a)(ii)(2) willl not enjoy the same leniency. If you have repudiated your contract, the fact that there happens to be a concurrent Illegality — it is hard to see how a repudiatory breach could be an Illegality in itself — will not save you from the full enormity of section 5(a)(ii) Event of Default style close out.

Failure to Pay or Deliver carve-out

Why is Section 5(a)(i) specifically carved out? No good reason, other than ISDA’s crack drafting squad™’s general neurosis/delight in over-communicating. Yes, it has its own separate Event of Default, with a much tighter timeline, so in practice one would never realistically trigger a failure to pay as a 5(a)(ii) event, but it is still a bit fussy carving it out.

ISDA’s crack drafting squad™. Never knowingly outfussed.™

It is an Event of Default not to supply documents for delivery

A failure to Furnish Specified Information — ie those documents for delivery specified in Part 3 of the ISDA Master Agreement, adverted to in Section 4(a)(ii) will therefore be an Event of Default, although you have to navigate a needlessly tortured string of clause cross references and double negatives to settle upon this conclusion.

Comparisons

A bit of pedantic flannel found its way into the 2002 ISDA — it captures not just the failure of the Credit Support Document itself, but any security interest granted under it, catering to the legal eagle’s most paranoid fears that a contractual right can have some sort of distinct ontological existence independently from the agreement which gives it breath and enforceable currency in the first place. But otherwise the same.

Summary

Before you even put your hand up: no, a Credit Support Annex between the two counterparties is not a “Credit Support Document”, at least under the English law construct: there it is a “Transaction” under the ISDA Master Agreement that offsets the net mark-to-market value of all the other Transactions, so can’t be a Credit Support Document per se. It is different with a 1994 NY CSA — being a pledge document it is a Credit Support Document, but even there the Users’ Guide cautions against treating a direct swap counterparty as a “Credit Support Provider” — the Credit Support Provider is meant to be a third party: hence references to the party itself defaulting directly under a Credit Support Document.

Therefore, tediously — and we think it was avoiding precisely this tediosity that the Users’ Guide had in mind, but, best-laid plans and all that — there is an ontological difference between the mechanics of close out when it comes to a failure under a New York-law CSA when compared to non-payment under an English-law CSA.

A failure to meet a margin call under an English-law CSA or any of its modern English-law successors is therefore a Failure to Pay or Deliver under Section 5(a)(i) of the actual ISDA Master Agreement; a failure to post under a New York-law CSA is a Section 5(a)(iii) Credit Support Default.

Does this make any difference at all? It may do, if you have negotiated different grace periods under your CSA than those under your ISDA Master Agreement proper.

Now, before you ask why anyone would ever do that, firstly let us say that far stupider things than that happen every freaking day in the negotiation of global markets documentation, and secondly that, for example, grace periods for regulatory initial margin may well be standardised — and dealers may not have the capacity or appetite to negotiate them tightly, given the paper war they will be in in any case — so you can quite easily see 2002 ISDAs with very brief grace periods, and Initial Margin CSDs with longer ones. So won’t this be fun when it comes to closeout.

General discussion

For paranoia junkies and conspiracy theorists amongst you, note the long reach this event of default gives to a Cross Default provision. Now, granted, in the ordinary course Cross Default keys off borrowed money or indebtedness, and by common convention that does not count out-of-the-money exposures under derivative contracts, so the ISDA Master Agreement’s own events of default should not exacerbate your cross-default risk under other contracts. Unless you widen Specified Indebtedness to include derivative exposures, as some counterparties do.

Okay; buckle in, for this is a bit of a Zodiac Mindwarp. But if you widen your conception of Specified Indebtedness ...

Now we see that courtesy of Section 5(a)(iii), a default by my Credit Support Provider (which, remember, need not be my parent: it may be an unaffiliated third-party like a bank writing a letter of credit or financial guarantee) is also default under my ISDA Master Agreement, even where I personally am fully solvent, in good standing, of sound credit and up-to-date with my rent, outgoings, credit card payments and so on.

Fair enough, you might say, for that Credit Support Document was a fundamental part of your calculus when you agreed to trade swaps with me in the first place, and so it was — but, since (through 5(a)(iii) that guarantor’s default counts as my default under our ISDA Master Agreement, through a carelessly widened cross-default in another facility that same guarantor default could be used by my other counterparties to accelerate those other facilities, even though those other facilities are not guaranteed by the same guarantor. So there is this ugly — rather theoretical, I grant you, but nonetheless ugly — snowball risk.

Just something to think about when your own credit department tries to loosen the waistband of what kinds of obligations trigger Cross Default, anyway.

Comparisons

No change between 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA.

Summary

A seldom-invoked grounds for terminating an ISDA Master Agreement but note a couple of things:

Firstly, unlike Breach of Agreement, there is no grace period allowing for rectification or correction of a misrepresentation. If you make a material false statement, you are thereafter immediately, and irrevocably, at your counterparty’s mercy.

Owning up to it, and trying to make things right, does not get you out of the schtuck. Nor is there any ticking clock by reference to which your Counterparty must use or lose its close-out right (though Americans may wonder about the “course of dealing”). This is, in equal parts, a boon and bane: it does not oblige a Non-Defaulting Party to take precipitate action, so it need not act rashly; on the other hand, it gives the Non-Defaulting Party a free option and the licence to pull something out of the bag long after the misrepresentation has ceased to have any practical effect. Would anyone actually behave like such a cad? You’d like to think no, but have you met any hedge fund managers?

In any case, there is a predictable cottage industry of credit officers tasking unwilling negotiations with the thankless task of sending out notices waiving misrepresentations about facts that the credit officer should not have asked for representations about in the first place.

Secondly, a misrepresentation is faster than a Breach of Agreement. The moment a misrepresentation is made, you can get out. No waiting for 30 days to see if anything comes right.

Given this, it is curious that Misrepresentation is not more frequently cited than it is — that may be to do with the liminal vagueness of the “materiality” requirement.

Misrepresentation? Or breach of warranty?

The purist’s objection is that, since a representation is a pre-contractual statement which induced the wronged party to enter the contract and (ergo) was not, and could not be, itself, a contractual term at all — its bolt was shot, so to speak, before “minds met” — and, as such, one’s remedy for misrepresentation ought to be to set aside the contract altogether (ab initio, as Latin lovers — well, my one, at any rate — would say) voiding it on grounds of no consensus, and not suing for damages for breach of something which, by your own argument, never made it into the cold hard light of legal reality. The JC is nothing if not a purist. We feel that, as written, this provision is a bit misconceived.

Giving our friends at ISDA the benefit of the doubt we think ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ means “breach of warranty”, and were really just being loose with terminology. There again, unlike other, more fundamental obligations, misrepresentation as an Event of Default has neither a materiality threshold nor the accommodation to the wrongdoer of a grace period or even a warning notice, so perhaps not. Anyway.

This is where that mystifying Section 3(d) representation comes in.

Representations by agents on agent’s own behalf

Where your client’s obligations under the ISDA Master Agreement are stewarded by an agent — quite common for an investment manager trading on behalf of a fund — a broker might think about having the agent represent, on its own behalf, about its role as agent. It might ask the agent to do this in the ISDA. The sound of an asset manager confirming its ongoing authority to bind its principal gladdens a broker’s heart. A full-throated assertion of its own regulatory authorisation; its continued good standing with the companies office; the continued involvement of its key persons in making investment decisions — each is sure to put a jaunt in a broker’s stride. Imaginative in-house counsel for the broker will doubtless dream up others.

But tarry a while. Firstly, your investment manager will sign as agent, for the client, not on its own behalf. For many this will be an article of profound faith: they will be at some pains, which they will willingly inflict on you, to avoid the barest hint they are speaking for themselves. “When an agent, as agent opens its mouth,” they will tell you, “it becomes its principal for all purposes that interest the law.”

And so it does. As far as the Courts of Chancery are concerned, to be an agent is to be wholly transubstantiated into the person of one’s principal. Transmogrified. It is, for all forensic intents to disappear; one’s ghostly outline may still be there, but it is a chimera: one exists only to be the earthly representation of another.

Which cast a pall over the representations you are being asked to make.

Take the one that “the principal has duly authorised the agent to act on its behalf”. For the principal to say that, through the person of the very one whose agency is in question, is some kind of Möbius loop. The very comfort you might draw from what is being said is taken away by the person who is saying it.

Even if the fact of the agency is in no doubt, the statements as to the agent’s character may be problematic. The agent is speaking for the principal, remember.

The exchange might go something like this:

Agent (as agent): Why would I be authorised by the FCA? I am not advising anyone. In fact, my investment manager is advising me. Why don’t you ask her?

Broker (rubbing its eyes and peering at the agent): But I am asking her. I mean you.

Agent (as agent): Who?

Broker: You! The investment manager for this blessed fund!

Agent (as agent): Ah, but I am not me, for now, you see. I am the earthly representative of the fund. In my own personal capacity, I don’t exist.

Broker: But you are here, aren’t you? Can’t I just quickly ask you? Can’t you just, you know, be yourself for a moment? It won’t take a mo —

Agent (as itself): What? Here? In this ISDA? You must be joking. I told you under no circumstances will I act as principal.

Broker (A light-bulb comes on): Aha! I've got it! All right then: can you make representations on behalf of your principal?

Agent (as agent) (Thinks for a moment.): Why yes! Yes, I can! That’s what I’m here, as agent, to do! What would you like me to represent?

Broker: Could you represent that your investment manager is duly authorised by the FCA?

Agent (as agent): WELL HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT??

Broker: What?

Agent (as agent): Look: why don’t you ask the agent?

But seriously

Assuming you can persuade your agent to represent, on its own behalf, about itself, as to these matters (whether in the master agreement itself or in a side letter):

• Due appointment, authority etc: This goes to the agent’s ostensible authority to bind its principal. If an investment manager breaches this kind or representation, then worst case the broker risks having no claim at all against the fund – if it can’t make out that there was ostensible authority.

• Now if (notwithstanding breach of this rep) the broker does still have a claim against the fund, then no harm no foul: we shouldn’t need to close out vs the fund unless/until there’s an independent failure to pay, in which case rely on that. But now we have actual knowledge of the agent’s lack of authority we may find we have a second problem: that there is no no-one with ostensible authority to bind the fund, and it is drifting rudderless towards a wall. If so, see below.
• If we don’t then our action is necessarily against the agent in its personal capacity and against its own assets, not the fund’s. It’s a claim in tort for negligent misstatement. Put yourself in the fund’s position here. Being itself a victim of the agent’s mendacity it will feel it is more sinn’d against than sinning and will not see why this should be a 3(d) representation under the ISDA Master Agreement. The fund will say “well hang on: I didn’t do anything wrong here: this asset manager is taking my name in vain without my consent – so how is it that you’re purporting to close out against me?

• Loss of manager’s regulatory status, no manager, no good standing etc: The other typical representations goes to a duly authorised manager’s continued ability to to act on the fund’s behalf: to manage positions, monitor risk tolerances and keep the ship steady. If the agent goes AWOL a [[[broker]] has some call to reduce risk against the fund. If the fund is a sports car, the broker’s ATEs are the measures it can take to prevent the car hitting a wall. As long as here is a competent agent driving the car, the broker can have some confidence the car will avoid walls by itself. If the driver is prevented from steering, the car will, eventually, hit the wall. So it is fair enough for the broker to say “okay: you are out of control: unless you name a new driver, within a given period ~ and here you may treat yourself to a fun exchange with your counterpart about how long that period should be ~ we can call this an ATE”.
  

Comparisons

DUST has been expanded in five significant ways by the 2002 ISDA. See the summary and general sections for details.

Summary

The connoisseur’s negotiation oubliette.

Default Under Specified Transaction — colloquially, “DUST” — is often confused with Cross Default. In fact, they’re meant to be mutually exclusive. That won’t stop folks conflating them, though. Look, we all do it.

DUST is like Cross Default, but where Cross Default references indebtedness owed to third parties, DUST is all about non-“borrowing” style transactions — e.g., swap agreements, stock loans and repos, but only transactions between the two counterparties.

If a Counterparty experiences an Event of Default under a swap agreement (or other “Specified Transaction” with you, this will be an Event of Default under the ISDA Master Agreement.

Changes from the 1992 Master Agreement

DUST overwent quite a makeover in the 2002 ISDA. For example:

Mini-closeout carveout: Defaults require the acceleration of just the Specified Transaction in question (for general defaults) but off all outstanding transactions under the relevant master agreement (for delivery defaults). This change was made with mini-close-out under repos and stock loans in mind — a concept which the stock loan market invented after the 1992 ISDA was published, so you can’t blame ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ for overlooking it at first — where delivery failures under are common and do not of themselves indicate weakness in the Defaulting Party’s creditworthiness.

Credit support failures covered: DUST under the 2002 ISDA can be triggered by default under a credit support arrangement relating to a Specified Transaction. These weren’t included for the 1992 ISDA DUST.

Shortened cure period: In tune with the general tightening up of cure periods — you know, we’re in a new millennium, computers work properly nowadays, and all that — the cure period for a failure to make a final or early termination payment on a Specified Transaction has been reduced from three days to one. This caused many a credit officer to sadly shake her head and refuse to move to the new agreement.

Repudiation evidence: Repudiation was modified to add the phrase “...or challenges the validity of ... after “... disaffirms, disclaims, repudiates or rejects ...” to reduce ambiguity as to whether a party’s action constitutes a repudiation. Also, we imagine, by way of stiffening the criteria for what counts as a repudiation, the 2002 requires written evidence that the repudiating party has an extended middle finger. This rules out being able to close out cornered hedge-fund managers, having been “brought to the negotiating table” by their fund’svproximity to a NAV trigger and who are not enjoying having their “feet held to the fire”, shouting “Well, bugger you, I shan’t pay, and let’s see how you like that” in the heat of the moment, when they really didn’t mean it, only to discover they had inadvertently repudiated a contract they were otherwise in perfect compliance with. Of course, no risk officer would dream of closing out an ISDA Master Agreement based on an intemperate oral communication, or the proverbial extended middle finger, for which she could not subsequently prove with fairly compelling evidence. But still.

Widened definition of Specified Transaction: The “Specified Transaction” concept has been broadened to include additional transaction types such as repos, and to include a catchall clause designed to include any future derivative products that have not been thought of yet.

Voltaire and DUST

In which ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ got bogged down in the weeds once in 1987, doubled down in their in-weed bogged-downness in 2002, and we’ve been dealing with resulting confusion ever since. A case of perfection being the enemy of good enough, as Voltaire would say, in the JC’s humble opinion, especially in these modern times where, thanks to compulsory daily zero-threshold variation margining, DUST is even more of a dead letter than it even was in the good old days. To our knowledge, no ISDA Master Agreement in history has been closed out using, exclusively, Section 5(a)(v).

That said, the 1992 ISDA version is a bit skew-wiff as regards mini-closeout, and you may find assiduous counterparties hungrily licking their lips at the prospect of a hearty negotiation about this bald man’s comb.

We are talking about other derivative-like transactions, between you and the same counterparty, where the counterparty presents a clear and present danger of blowing up, but where that behaviour has not yet manifested under the present ISDA Master Agreement, meaning you have no grounds to blow them up directly. So, you know, fairly implausible scenario, but still. You want to use the event arising under this other Specified Transaction to detonate the present ISDA. The squad breaks your ability to do so down in to four scenarios:

• Counterparty fails to pay amounts falling due before maturity on a Specified Transaction, and you accelerate that transaction, but not necessarily others under the same master agreement. Here the principle is that any obligation to pay a sum of money on time is fundamental, of the essence and speaks indelibly to a merchant’s credit, whether or not one accelerates other related Specified Transactions (though, actually, walk me through the scenarios in which you wouldn’t, or even weren’t obliged to?)
• Counterparty fails to pay amounts falling due at maturity on a Specified Transaction, so you can’t “accelerate” as such on that Specified Transaction, as it has matured, but you are still out of pocket and of a mind to press a big red button — though, again, curiously, only on this Specified Transaction and not the other outstanding transactions under the same master agreement, even though you could;
• Counterparty fails to deliver assets due under a Specified Transaction, and as a result you accelerate the Specified Transaction (1992 ISDA) or all Specified Transactions under the affected master agreement (2002 ISDA — the 2002 version being designed to carve out things like mini close-out under a 2010 GMSLA as these are not credit-related;
• Counterparty presents you an extended middle finger generally with regard to any obligation under any Specified Transaction, whether you accelerate it or not. Here if your counterparty is playing craziest dude in the room, it has committed a repudiatory breach thereby losing what moral high-ground it might otherwise stand on to expect you to follow form and protocol before closing it out.
  

Acceleration, not Default

DUST is triggered by an acceleration following an event of default under the Specified Transaction, not upon the default itself. Since the Specified Transaction is between you and the other party to the ISDA Master Agreement, there is no great loss — it is within your gift to accelerate the other contract — and to achieve set-off you would have to do so anyway.

This is less drastic than the corresponding Cross Default provision, which imports all the Events of Default from all Specified Indebtedness into the present one, even if the counterparty to the defaulted contract has itself waived its rights to exercise.

Default under any Specified Transaction, and the question of overreach

DUST attaches to a “default” (not defined) under any Specified Transaction, and (other than under Section 5(a)(v)(3) for delivery failures) not all Specified Transactions. But if you have a credit concern with a counterparty under a derivative-like master agreement — even on a failure to pay — you are hardly likely to be closing out some, but not other transactions. Especially not now in these days of compulsory regulatory variation margin. You’ll be closing out the lot. Yet, with different rules depending on whether its a failure to pay (before or at maturity), failure to deliver or repudiation, we think ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ has made it all a bit fiddly. They may be strictly correct, but come on.

So we have a lot of sympathy with the point, pedantic though it may be, that the DUST formulation could be simplified for transactions under any master agreement — even for repudiation — by requiring the Non-Defaulting Party to have closed out the whole arrangement, not just the Specified Transaction itself. An amendment to the following effect, rendered in ISDA’s leaden prose, wouldn’t be out of the question:

“For the purposes of Section 5(a)(v) where any Specified Transaction is governed by a master agreement, an event will only be a Default Under Specified Transaction where it results in an early termination of all transactions outstanding under the same master agreement.”

Final payments

The reason for the second limb of the definition is to catch final payments, which can’t be accelerated as such, since they’re already due.

Differences between cross default and DUST

Ideally, cross default and DUST should be mutually exclusive. They are meant to dovetail with each other, not cross over. This will not stop mission creep from over-zealous credit departments, who will try to expand the scope of each, leading to all kinds of cognitive dissonances and righteous indignation from the counterparty’s negotiator. As ammunition for your fruitless attempts to persuade the credit department to live in the real world for once, try these:

• Cross default generally references indebtedness where the exercising counterparty has significant loan-type exposure to the defaulter; DUST references bilateral derivative and trading transactions which tend not to be in the nature of indebtedness (it is true to say that the line between these can be gray, especially in the case of uncollateralised derivative relationships;
• Cross default is only triggered once a certain threshold amount of indebtedness is defaulted upon; DUST is triggered upon any breach;
• Cross default references your Counterparty owes to a third party outside your control; DUST references other obligations your counterparty owes you or an affiliate you can reasonably be expected to be in league with. (ie you can't generally trigger if your counterparty defaults on Specified Transactions it has on with third parties)
• DUST only comes about if the Specified Transaction in question has been actually accelerated, whereas cross default is available whether the primary creditor has accelerated or not. (A cross default which requires acceleration is called “cross acceleration”.)
  

Payment acceleration versus delivery acceleration — mini close-out

Upon a payment default under 5(a)(v)(1), only that particular transaction must be accelerated (it doesn’t require full close out of the relevant Master Agreement. But a delivery default under 5(a)(v)(3), is only triggered if the whole Master Agreement is closed out.

Why would that be? Oh! Yes, Stock loan ninja at the back, with your hand up!

Stock loan ninja (for it is he): Sir! Sir! Please sir, is this to stop the mini-closeout of a single Loan under a 2010 GMSLA?

The JC (beaming inscrutably): Yeeeees — Go on — ?

SLN: Sir, please sir, settlement failures under a stock loan are often a function of market illiquidity (the asset to be delivered isn’t available) and aren’t necessarily indicative of credit deterioration, sir, so should not necessarily trigger a DUST under the ISDA. But this situation would never apply to a simple cash payment. On the other hand, if the whole 2010 GMSLA is closed out as a result of a delivery fail, you clearly are in a credit-stress situation.

JC: Excellent!

What if I “jump the gun”?

Could a wrongfully submitted notice of default be treated as a repudiation/anticipatory breach by the “non-defaulting party” giving the other party at least the right to withhold payments on the basis that this would constitute a Potential Event of Default by the party submitting the notice? There’s not much law on point, but the starting point is “no” - it would simply be an ineffective notice. However, a non-payment on the basis of an ineffective notice would be impermissible and may itself amount to a Failure to Pay. But as to the mere dispatch of the notice itself, there is relatively recent case law (albeit in the bond world) stating that an acceleration notice that is submitted wrongfully, i.e. when no actual event of default, is merely ineffective and does not give rise to a claim for breach of contract or damages from “defaulting party”. Clearly this has not been considered in context of ISDA per se (and may be nuances here that would lead to different result) but at it is a start.

Comparisons

The 2002 ISDA updates the 1992 ISDA’s Cross Default so that if the combined amount outstanding under the two limbs of Cross Default exceed the Threshold Amount, then it will be an Event of Default. Normally, under the 1992 ISDA, Cross Default requires one or the other limbs to be satisfied — you can’t add them together. This was a bit of a snafu.

The two limbs are:

1. a default under a financial agreement that would allow a creditor to accelerate any indebtedness that party owes it;
2. a failure to pay on the due date under such agreements after the expiry of a grace period.

Cross default in securities financing arrangements

Neither the 2010 GMSLA nor the Global Master Repurchase Agreement have, as standard, either a cross default or a default under specified transaction provision. Unless some bright spark thinks it is a good idea to negotiate one in.

Comaprison with cross acceleration

Cross acceleration is essentially cross default only tweaked such that it is only triggered on actual acceleration of 3rd party indebtedness rather than the mere potential for acceleration. This is enough of a difference to make it worth its own page so if you're interested in that please see Cross Acceleration.

Summary

Cross Default covers the unique risks that come from lending money to people who have also borrowed heavily from others, likely on better terms than you. The basic vibe is:

If any of your other loans become payable, I want mine to be payable too.

In the ISDA Master Agreement that means I get an Event of Default. Sounds simple? Well: ride with me a while.

Origins in the loan market

Cross default grew out of the traditional loan market, and was transplanted into derivatives at the dawn of the Age of Swaps. Consider a traditional unsecured loan. Its characteristics are as follows:

Firstly, there is an identifiable lender — usually a bank — and borrower — usually a business — in a formalised relationship of dominance and subservience. Their roles in this power structure cannot change. The lender is, always, the lender: it gives away its money against the borrower’s bare promise to later give it back. The borrower does not have risk to the lender.

Secondly, a loan is an outright allocation of capital from lender to borrower. There, intrinsically, credit risk. The lender’s main concern is that the borrower can give the money back. It will want the right to force it to if the borrower’s creditworthiness takes a turn for the worse. The bank therefore wants its “weapons” pointed at the borrower. The borrower, in contrast, has no need to point any weapons at the bank.

Thirdly, the borrower has few payment obligations: usually, only periodic interest and final repayment. Most of the borrower’s obligations come at the end of the contract.

Fourthly, unless the borrower defaults, the bank cannot get its money back before expiry of the term. All it is entitled to is periodic interest on the amount loaned.

Because the borrower has infrequent payment obligations, and they are large, the bank will want to be able to call a default as soon as it thinks the customer will not be able to repay. It will not want to wait and see.

But what default events can it look to? “Failure to pay” or “breach of agreement” won’t do, because there might not be any payment obligations due under the loan. If the borrower has loans with other banks, it may owe interest on them before it owes anything under this loan.

This will make all bank lenders nervous: if the borrower becomes distressed, everyone will want to use their weapons as soon as possible: there is an advantage to being the first lender to pull the trigger. If one lender shoots — if it even becomes entitled to shoot — then the other banks will want to be able to shoot, too.

Hence, the concept of “cross default”: should a borrower be in material default under a third-party loan, cross default permits the bank to call in its loan, too, even though the borrower has not missed any payments directly. Even if none were even due.

This puts the borrower’s lenders into a standoff: all will have “twitchy trigger fingers”. All will want to accelerate their loans as soon as anybody else is entitled to.

There is a curious “systemantic” effect here: though Cross Default is designed as a credit mitigant, its very existence makes a credit default more likely.

The loan market therefore developed some “thresholds” around the cross-default concept: firstly, you could only invoke Cross Default if the borrower’s default exceeded a certain monetary value. Cross Default should only apply to events material enough to threaten the borrower’s solvency.

Recap: Cross Default is meant to protect against the risk of material uncollateralised indebtedness, on terms containing infrequent payment obligations, where the borrower also has significant indebtedness to other lenders in the market. It is a one-way right. A borrower has no cross-default right against a lender.

The ISDA evolved from the loan market

We have seen that the ISDA Master Agreement developed out of the loan market. Early swaps were offsetting loans. They were documented by lawyers who were banking specialists: they were used to thinking about the world in terms of lending.

It was only natural that early versions of the ISDA Master Agreement included the usual set of banker’s “weapons” to manage the risk of default. That included Cross Default.

Swaps are different

But swaps are not very much like outright loans. They are financing, not lending arrangements: The swap dealer does not allocate capital outright to the customer, as a lender does. Financing and lending are fundamentally different activities. They present different risks.

Swaps, also, are by their nature fully bi-directional. There is no fixed lender and borrower. (In theory, there’s no lender or borrower at all). Under a swap, either party can “owe money”. Who is “in-the-money” can change suddenly, without warning and it has nothing to do with the parties’ relative creditworthiness.

This means the Events of Default under the ISDA Master Agreement must be symmetrical and bi-directional: if there is to be a Cross Default right, it must point in both directions. Therefore, unlike in a traditional loan the Cross Default in the ISDA Master Agreement applies equally to the bank as it does to the customer.

This presents some rather curly conceptual challenges, as we will see.

Cross default is not needed in a swap

In any case, the risks of loans that Cross Default address, broadly, do not hold for swaps:

Firstly, swaps are not primarily instruments of uncollateralised indebtedness.

Secondly, there tend to be multiple small Transactions rather than a single big one: therefore payments under the ISDA architecture are frequent and flow in both directions, especially under an ISDA Master Agreement with multiple Transactions. You don’t have the “no coupon due for six months” problem.

Thirdly, ISDA Master Agreements are typically margined, so even though it is conceptually possible for uncollateralised exposure to arise under an ISDA, in practice, it there won’t be much and it will be quickly reset.

Lastly, the majority of swap end users will not have significant unmargined third-party debt: investment funds tend to invest on margin. They do not borrow under uncollateralised loans. So there are few instances of specified indebtedness that they are likely to trigger. It is far more likely that a bank counterparty or swap dealer will have material specified indebtedness. This is a bit of a self-own.

You would not expect Cross Default to often arise as a sole means of closing out an ISDA Master Agreement. Usually, there would long since have been a Failure to Pay or Deliver or Bankruptcy, and both of those events are a much more deterministic, identifiable and therefore safe means of bringing an ISDA arrangement to an end.

How does Cross Default work?

Imagine swap counterparty N who, alongside its ISDA Master Agreement with you, has significant Specified Indebtedness to lenders A, B and C.

Should N default under any of that indebtedness — that is, should any of those lenders become entitled to call in their loans, whether or not they actually do — in a total sum greater than your agreed “Threshold Amount”, you would be entitled to close out your ISDA, even though N had not defaulted in any way directly to you.

“Specified Indebtedness”

What counts as “Specified Indebtedness”? The ISDA itself defines it as “borrowed money” without further elaborating on what that means. Generally speaking, it means loans.

Financing arrangements

“Borrowed money” excludes margined financing arrangements. “Financing arrangements” include a wide selection of capital markets transactions including margin loans, synthetic prime brokerage, swaps, stock loans and repos.

These are “asset transformations” rather than borrowings and do not involve uncollateralised “indebtedness” as such: at inception, the party raising money gives title to an asset of greater value to the financer, and is subsequently margined to that asset value. Therefore net, the financing beneficiary is not a debtor at all, but a creditor.

This does not stop excitable credit officers expanding “Specified Indebtedness” to bring financing arrangements into scope. A favourite tweak is to include derivatives and securities financing arrangements without stopping to clarify how the “borrowed money” under them (hint, under a margined ISDA, there will not be any) is to be measured. Notional? Mark-to-market exposure? Outstanding payment obligations? Present value of all future payments?

Bank deposits

Bank deposits plainly are “borrowed money”, and they mightily add up: as we will see, aggregation is important when calculating the Threshold Amount.

Bank deposits illustrate the problem of having cross-default in a financing contract like an ISDA. In the traditional loan market, bank deposits tend not to trigger cross default obligations, because the sort of parties having cross default obligations do not have deposits. Only banks accept deposits. Since they are usually the lender in a commercial loan they, and their deposits, are not subject to cross default.

But ISDAs are bilateral, so a bank dealer’s deposits will be in scope and could trigger a Cross Default against a bank. It is not out of the question that a bank could be prevented from honouring deposits through operational error, IT outage or geopolitical incident. This would put it in technical default on a large number of its deposits at once.

Therefore, banks exclude retail deposits from the ambit of Specified Indebtedness. They will not lightly resile from this position, so buy-side legal eagles looking for a ditch to die in are advised to avoid this one.

Public indebtedness

With the honourable exception of public bond issuances, most Specified Indebtedness arises under private arrangements about which the market will have no reliable real-time information. No one will know how much a given borrower owes, much less whether it has defaulted and when.

This makes practical policing and enforcement of Cross Default fraught, where it is even possible.

“Default”

“Default” is described widely and (at least in the 2002 ISDA) is not restricted to payment defaults. A technical breach of representations as long as it entitles the lender to accelerate would count towards an actionable Cross Default.

Vitally, the lender need not actually accelerate the loan. The cross-default right arises as soon as it is entitled to accelerate. This makes the Cross Default event a powerful and sensitive tool. Too powerful. Too sensitive.

There is now an entirely different page dedicated to cross acceleration — a weakened version of Cross Default that requires the loan to be actually called in.

“Threshold Amount”

The Threshold Amount is the level over which accumulated defaults in Specified Indebtedness trigger Cross Default. It is usually expressed as a cash amount or a percentage of shareholder funds, or both, in which case — schoolboy error hazard alert — be careful to say whether it is the greater or lesser of the two.

Because of the extreme risk Cross Default presents, the Threshold Amount should represent an existential threat to the counterparty’s solvency. For a bank counterparty, that is typically two or three per cent of its shareholders’ equity or the cash equivalent.

A cash equivalent runs the risk of “decoupling” from the value of shareholders’ equity — especially in times of great market stress — so while it is easier to measure and monitor, it presents a greater systemic risk, and you may find it more prudent to stick with an equity-linked threshold.

Snowball risk

This “accumulation” feature means relatively trivial amounts of indebtedness can be problematic. This is particularly so where there are a lot of them — see bank deposits and swap transactions — or where the default is technical, systemic or operational. Should a system outage prevent a counterparty from honouring a class of contracts it might instantly trigger a catastrophic cross-default right across all ISDA Master Agreements.

For buy-side parties (especially for thinly capitalised investment vehicles) the Threshold Amount may be a lot lower than that — like, ten million dollars or so — and, of course, for fund entities will key off NAV, not shareholder funds.

Problematic derivatives

Bear in mind, too, that if even one of your ISDA contracts has a lower Threshold Amount, that can create a chain reaction: because the exposure under that ISDA, once it has been triggered by a Cross Default, then contributes to the total amount of defaulted Specified Indebtedness and may itself lead to Threshold Amounts being triggered in other ISDAs. And each of those then contributes … you get the idea.

The obvious solution is to exclude derivatives and similar financing arrangements from the definition of Specified Indebtedness. That is, to revert to the ISDA standard.

Cherry-picking

One last problem with including swaps: how do you measure the “indebtedness” under a Transaction?

You could, in theory, cherry-pick all out-of-the-money Transactions, total them up and cross a Threshold Amount fairly easily.

Nothing requires you to apply a Single Agreement concept or cross-transactional netting to those exposures. (Why would it? ISDA contracts are meant to be out of scope for Cross Default).

Even if you calculate Specified Indebtedness by reference to a net close-out amount, this only really highlights the imbalance between dealers and their customers. Sure, big fund managers may have ten, twenty or even fifty ISDA Master Agreements, but they will be split across dozens of different funds, each a different entity with its own Threshold Amount. Swap dealers, on the other hand, will have literally hundreds of thousands of master agreements, all facing the same legal entity. Dealers are the wrong side of this risk.

Now, you could manage this by careful negotiation — but there is a better way: excluding financing transactions altogether, for the perfectly sensible reason that they are not “borrowed money”.

Cross default as a “most favoured nation” clause

While the ISDA Events of Default are standardised, bilaterally-negotiated default events under private loans will be highly customised.

Especially since Section 5(a)(vi) is pretty loose about what counts as a qualifying default:

“a default, event of default or other similar condition or event (however described) in respect of such party”.

This could include potential events of default (those which will become an event of default on expiry of a grace period). In any case, it would haul into the ISDA’s ambit any weird or sensitive default triggers in that loan documentation that deal with peculiarities of the lending arrangement and have no real bearing on the general credit position of the borrower as a derivatives counterparty.

In other words Cross Default functions as a gated “most favoured nation” clause. This is a wide, swingeing term and is likely to be much more severe against bank and dealer counterparties than end-users, since banks will have a lot more indebtedness.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 5(a)(vi)

Differences between cross default and DUST

Ideally, cross default and DUST should be mutually exclusive. They are meant to dovetail with each other, not cross over. This will not stop mission creep from over-zealous credit departments, who will try to expand the scope of each, leading to all kinds of cognitive dissonances and righteous indignation from the counterparty’s negotiator. As ammunition for your fruitless attempts to persuade the credit department to live in the real world for once, try these:

• Cross default generally references indebtedness where the exercising counterparty has significant loan-type exposure to the defaulter; DUST references bilateral derivative and trading transactions which tend not to be in the nature of indebtedness (it is true to say that the line between these can be gray, especially in the case of uncollateralised derivative relationships;
• Cross default is only triggered once a certain threshold amount of indebtedness is defaulted upon; DUST is triggered upon any breach;
• Cross default references your Counterparty owes to a third party outside your control; DUST references other obligations your counterparty owes you or an affiliate you can reasonably be expected to be in league with. (ie you can't generally trigger if your counterparty defaults on Specified Transactions it has on with third parties)
• DUST only comes about if the Specified Transaction in question has been actually accelerated, whereas cross default is available whether the primary creditor has accelerated or not. (A cross default which requires acceleration is called “cross acceleration”.)

Comparisons

Redlines

• 1987 ⇒ 1992: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1992 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’02 vs. the ’92: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1987 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)

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Discussion

There are two differences between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA definitions of Bankruptcy.

First, the 2002 ISDA has a slightly more specific concept of “insolvency”. In limb 4 (insolvency proceedings) a new limb has been included to cover action taken by an entity-specific regulator or supervisor (as opposed to a common or garden insolvency proceeding): If initiated by a regulator, the game’s up as soon as the action is taken. If initiated by a random creditor, the action must have resulted in a winding-up order, or at least not have been discharged in 15 (not 30) days.

About that grace period. Second, and unnervingly for those of little faith in their own accounts payble departments, the grace period in which one must arrange the dismissal of a vexations or undeserving insolvency petition (under 5(a)(vii)(4)) or the exercise of security over assets (under 5(a)(vii)(7)) is compressed from 30 days to 15 days.

Summary

The truncating the grace period from 30 days in the 1992 ISDA to 15 days in the 2002 ISDA has, in aggregate over the whole global market, kept many a negotiator in “meaningful” employment. It has also been a large reason why many organisations did not move to the 2002 ISDA and of those who eventually did — organisations whom you’d think would know better — then set about amending these grace periods back to the 1992 ISDA standard of 30 days or better still, insisted on sticking with the 1992 ISDA, but upgrading every part of it to the 2002 ISDA except for the Bankruptcy and Failure to Pay grace periods. A spectacular use of ostensibly limited resources, and an insight into whose benefit organisations really operate for.

Regional bankruptcy variations

The Germanic lands have peculiar ideas when it comes to bankruptcy — particularly as regards banks, so expect to see odd augmentations and tweaks to ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ standard language. Will these make any practical difference? Almost certainly not: it is hard to see any competent authority in Germany, Switzerland or Austria — storeyed nations all, in the long history of banking, after all — not understanding how to resolve a bank without blowing up its netting portfolio. Especially since Basel, where the netting regulations were formulated, is actually in Switzerland.

We have a whole page about Swiss Bankruptcy Language. True story.

The market standard “bankruptcy” definition

The ISDA bankruptcy definition is rarely a source of great controversy (except for the grace period, which gets negotiated only through custom amongst ISDA negotiators because, in its wisdom, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ thought fit to halve it from 30 days to 15 in the 2002 ISDA.

So you have a sort of pas-de-deux between negotiators where they argue about it for a while before getting tired, being shouted at by their business people, and moving on to something more important to argue about, like Cross Default).

Otherwise, the ISDA bankruptcy clause is a much loved and well-used market standard and you often see it being co-opted into other trading agreements precisely because everyone knows it and no one really argues about it.

1987 ISDA and Automatic Early Termination

Note, for students of history, Automatic Early Termination is (was, right? Oh, come on, guys —) problematic under the 1987 ISDA.

TL;DR

Here are all the stages you must go through between becoming entitled to terminate and settlement for a Failure to Pay or Deliver. Note something very important:

Because you have been exchanging VM, as of the Early Termination Date, the MTM of the collateralised portfolio of Transactions should be more or less zero. A doughnut. Therefore, the final gain or loss that is secured by Posted Credit Support (IM) is a function of the change in portfolio value between the Early Termination Date and when you work out the Early Termination Amount.

That is to say, you will not know who is owed money until you have worked out the Early Termination Amount. For people who want to enforce on Posted Credit Support (IM) the moment there is an Event of Default, please consider this. You do not need to enforce security yet. You might not actually be owed anything.

Okay, so here goes with the timeline:

• T: There must be a Bankruptcy Event of Default on a day, T.
• T: You must send a Section 6(a) notice designating an Early Termination Date for all outstanding Transactions. It must be within 20 days. Let’s say it is the same day, for the hell of it
• T: You are “off risk” and must start calculating your Close-out Amounts for all outstanding Transactions. You must do this as soon as reasonably practicable. Let’s say that takes another 30 days.
• T+30: having calculated all Close-out Amounts and totted them all up into a single Early Termination Amount: You send your Section 6(d) statement advising of that amount, giving bank details and supplying your workings.
• T+31: Your Early Termination Amount is due.

In Full

So, to close out following a Bankruptcy, you will need:

1. There must be a Bankruptcy under Section 5(a)(vii)

There are nine different types of bankruptcy under the ISDA. Most are formal, public events (regulator institutes bankruptcy proceedings, administrator appointed, etc — watch too for local regulator actions and bail ins specified in the ISDA Master Agreement if your counterparty is a bank) that the would be widely known about. Others are less public and might happen more quickly. The ones most likely to happen first are:

• becoming unable to pay debts as they fall due or admitting it in writing
• making a composition with creditors
• a secured party enforcing against substantially all assets (though “substantially all assets” is a high bar, and would not be likely to apply to a significant financial institution)

Unlike a Failure to Pay, you do not need to wait for the close of business, or any grace periods to expire.

2. Send a Section 6(a) notice designating an Early Termination Date

Once there is a live Bankruptcy Event, Section 6(a) allows you, by not more than 20 days’ notice, to designate an Early Termination Date for all outstanding Transactions.

So, at some point in the next twenty days outstanding Transactions will be at an end. Now this is a different thing from knowing what the amounts will be, much less knowing when they will be paid or who will owe them: this is the date by reference to which Termination Amounts will be calculated.

Usually, you will want to go “off risk” as quickly as possible, so the Early Termination Date will likely be the date you send your Section 6(a) notice or soon after. The 20 days’ time limit on the notice period is a red herring.

3. Determine Close-out Amounts

Now, ascertain termination values for the Terminated Transactions as of the Early Termination Date per the methodology set out in Section 6(e)(i). Section 6(c) reminds us for the avoidance of doubt that even if the Event of Default which triggers the Early Termination Date evaporates in the meantime — these things happen, okay? — yon Defaulting Party’s goose is still irretrievably cooked. The trading and risk people need to come up with Close-out Amounts for all outstanding Transactions. Now note, even though you have designated an Early Termination Date not more than 20 days from your Section 6(a) notice, it may well take you a lot longer to close out your portfolio than that, and as long as you are acting in a commercially reasonable way, you can take longer. There is a longer essay about the meaningless of that 20-day time limit here. Once they have done that you are ready for your Section 6(e) notice.

4. Calculate and notify

The Early Termination Date is the date on which the Transactions terminate; it is the date by reference to which you calculate their termination values, not the date by which you have to have valued, much less settled outstanding amounts due as a result of their termination — that would be a logical impossibility for those not imbued with the power of foresight.

Here we move onto Section 6(d), under which, as soon as is practicable after the Early Termination Date, your boffins work out all the termination values for each Transaction, tot them up to arrive at the Section 6(e) amount, and send a statement to the defaulting party, specifying the Early Termination Amount payable, the bank details, and reasonable details of calculations.

5. Pay your Early Termination Amount

Your in-house metaphysicians having calculated your Close-out Amounts, and assembled all the values into an Early Termination Amount the party who owes it must pay the Early Termination Amount. With ISDA’s crack drafting squad™’s yen for infinite particularity, this will depend on whether the Early Termination Date follows an Event of Default or a Termination Event. If the former, the Early Termination Amount is payable at once, as soon as the 6(d) statement is deemed delivered; if a Termination Event, only two Local Business Days — I know, right — after the 6(d) statement is delivered (or, where there are two Affected Parties and both are delivering each other 6(d) statements — I know, right — after both have done so).

Comparisons

Redlines

• 1987 ⇒ 1992: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1992 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’02 vs. the ’92: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1987 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)

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Discussion

ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ giveth and ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ taketh away.

In 1992, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ added references to a party’s Credit Support Providers and Credit Support Documents — the 1987 ISDA did not have a concept of a Credit Support Provider at all (though it does contemplate Credit Support Documents).

In 2002 some further enhancements: ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ had contrived some different ways of describing how a company might reorganise itself (specifically, “reorganisation, reincorporation or reconstitution”). It also, uncharacteristically, deletes the text “by operation of law or pursuant to an agreement reasonably satisfactory to the other party to this Agreement”. This removes an unnecessary restriction on the foregoing event (the surviving entity failing to assume all the obligations under the ISDA) so makes sense: the squad here is just correcting its own verbal profligacy.

Summary

When a firm merges into, or is taken over by, another, some magical — or unexpected — things can happen. Not for nothing does the ISDA Master Agreement labour over the very description: that this might be a “consolidation, amalgamation, merger, transfer, reorganisation, reincorporation or reconstitution” — prolix even by the lofty standards of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ — should tell you something. Generations of corporate lawyers have forged whole careers — some never leaving the confines of their law practices for forty or more years — out of the manifold ways one can put companies together and take them apart again.

Your correspondent is not one of those people and has little more to say about mergers, except that what happens to live contracts at the time of such chicanery will depend a lot on just how the companies and their assets are being joined together or torn assunder.

If the ISDA Master Agreement and its extant Transactions carry across — which, in a plain merger, they ought to — all well and good - though watch out for traps: what if both merging companies have ISDAs with the same counterparty, but on markedly different terms? Which prevails? Do they both? Which one do you use for new Transactions? This you will have to hammer out across the negotiating table.

But in some cases, Transactions might not carry across. Perhaps the resulting entity has no power to transact swaps. Perhaps it is in a jurisdiction in which they — or ISDA’s sainted close-out netting provisions, about which so many tears and so much blood is annually spilled — cannot be enforced. Perhaps the new entity just refuses to honour them.

Merger Without Assumption addresses all of these contingencies.

This is the clause that would have been covered by Section 5(a)(ii)(2) repudiation, had the resulting entity accepted the contract at all in the first place. It can be triggered if the resulting party repudiates any outstanding Transactions under the ISDA Master Agreement (or otherwise they are not binding on it); or any Credit Support Document stops working as a result of the merger.

And “all or substantially all” means what exactly?

There’s not a lot of case law on it. Some say 90%. Some say 75%. Some people — your correspondent included — say “shoot me”.

But, interestingly, Merger Without Assumption doesn’t seem to bite where one entity transferred all of its assets, half-half, into two distinct entities. I dunno — could it happen? Search me. You’ll have to go and find one of those corporate lawyers I was talking about before to find that out. They love that kind of stuff.

Details

MI by 2002

Comparisons

Template:Isda 5(b)(i) comp

Summary

Template:Isda 5(b)(i) summ

Comparisons

Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

Depending on your edition of the ISDA Master Agreement, “5(b)(ii)” could be a reference to:

• Tax Event (1992 ISDA)
• Force Majeure Event (2002 ISDA)

Force Majeure Event: There is no Force Majeure in the 1992 ISDA, though parties would habitually negotiate one in, and by the time the 2002 ISDA was published it was in fairly standardised. For those who didn’t negotiate it in there was also the ISDA Illegality/Force Majeure Protocol (see here) which they could sign — upon payment of the suitable fee is ISDA — to adopt/incorporate the relevant parts.

Summary

For the last word on force majeure, the JC’s ultimate force majeure clause is where it’s at. Breaking what must be a habit of a lifetime, somehow ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ managed to refrain from going crazy-ape bonkers with a definition of force majeure and instead, didn’t define it at all. In the 1992 ISDA they didn’t even include the concept.

Interlude: if you are in a hurry you can avoid this next bit.

I don’t know this, but I am going to hazard the confident hypothesis that what happened here was this:

ISDA’s crack drafting squad™, having convened its full counsel of war, fought so bloodily over the issue, over so long a period, that the great marble concourse on Mount Olympus was awash with the blood of slain legal eagles, littered with severed limbs, wings, discarded weapons, arcane references to regional variations of tidal waves, horse droppings from Valkyries etc., that there was barely a soul standing, and the only thing that prevented total final wipe-out was someone going, “ALL RIGHT, GOD DAMN IT. WE WON’T DEFINE WHAT WE MEAN BY FORCE MAJEURE AT ALL.”

There was then this quiet, eerie calm, when remaining combatants suddenly stopped; even those mortally wounded on the floor looked up, beatifically; a golden light bathed the whole atrium, choirs of angels sang and the chairperson said, “right, well that seems like a sensible, practical solution. What next then?”

“We thought we should rewrite the 2002 ISDA Equity Derivatives Definitions in machine code, your worship.”

“Excellent idea! Let’s stop faffing around with this force majeure nonsense and do that then!”

Ok back to normal.

Force Majeure in the 1992 ISDA

We may have said this before but, just because there isn’t a Force Majeure proper in the preprinted 1992 doesn’t mean people don’t borrow the concept from the 2002 — which has been around for, you know, 21 years now — and put it in anyway. One thing we can’t fathom is what possessed ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ to put it in at Section 5(b)(ii), rather than Section 5(b)(iv) just before the Additional Termination Event section, because for absolute shizzle anyone familiar with one version of the ISDA Master Agreement is going to get confused as hell if they start misunderstanding clause references in the other.

Act of state

Note the reference to “act of state”. Now a state, rather like a corporation, is a juridical being — a fiction of the law — with no res extensa as such. It exists on the rarefied non-material plane of jurisprudence. There are, thus, only a certain number of things that, without the agency of one if its employees, a state can do, and these involve enacting and repealing laws, promulgating and withdrawing regulations, signing treaties, entering contracts and, where is has waived its sovereign immunity, litigating their meaning.

Thus, a force majeure taking the shape of an act of state is, we humbly submit, a change in law which makes it impossible for one side or the other to perform its obligations. Compare, therefore, with Illegality.

Waiting Period (2002)

The point of Waiting Period is, for potential scenarios that might wind up justifying termination later, but you don’t yet know that, to build in a period to wait and see. For Illegality events (Section 5(b)(i)) is three Local Business Days — it is not so likely that an Illegality will sort itself out; for a Force Majeure Event (5(b)(ii) — where insh’Allah, things will come right and everyone can eventually go back to what they were doing, it is eight Local Business Days.

Waiting Periods — as defined in the ISDA Master Agreement also sometimes show up sometimes in other booklets — for example, ISDA’s Emissions Annex.

Through the good offices of Section 5(d), payments and deliveries which otherwise would be due during a Waiting Period are suspended.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 5(b)(ii)

Comparisons

Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

The 1992 ISDA represented a significant change from the 1987 ISDA which was a bit half-hearted about gross-ups.

Other than the renumbering, no real changes in the definition of Tax Event from the 1992 ISDA to the 2002 ISDA though, unhelpfully, the sub-paragraph references in the 1992 ISDA are (1) and (2) and in the 2002 ISDA are (A) and (B). Otherwise, pretty much the same.

Summary

Basically, the gist is this: if the rules change after the Trade Date such that you have to gross up an Indemnifiable Tax would weren’t expecting to when you priced the trade, you have a right to get out of the trade, rather than having to ship the gross up for the remainder of the Transaction.

That said, this paragraph is a bastard to understand. Have a gander at the JC’s nutshell version (premium only, sorry) and you’ll see it is not such a bastard after all, then.

In the context of cleared swaps, you typically add a third limb, which is along the lines of:

(3) required to make a deduction from a payment under an Associated LCH Transaction where no corresponding gross up amount is required under the corresponding Transaction Payment under this Agreement.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 5(b)(iii)

Comparisons

Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

Redlines

• 1987 ⇒ 1992: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1992 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’02 vs. the ’92: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1987 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)

---

Discussion

Tax Event Upon Merger: Note the missing “indemnifiable” from the fifth line of the 2002 ISDA version and the expanded description of “merger events” towards the end of the clause. And the renumbering as a result of the Force Majeure Event clause in the 2002 ISDA.

Summary

This is you can imagine, a red letter day for ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ who quite outdid itself in the complicated permutations for how to terminate an ISDA Master Agreement should there be a Tax Event or a Tax Event Upon Merger. Things kick off in Section 6(b)(ii) and it really just gets better from there.

So, Tax Event Upon Merger considers the scenario where the coming together of two entites — we assume they hail from different jurisdictions or at least have different practical tax residences — has an unfortunate effect on the tax status of payments due by the merged entity under an existing Transaction.

It introduces a new and unique concept — the “Burdened Party”, being the one who gets slugged with the tax — and who may or may not be the “Affected Party” — in this case the one subject to the merger.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 5(b)(iv)

Comparisons

Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

First established in the 1987 ISDA, CEUM was gently upgraded for the 1992 ISDA to include Credit Support Providers and Specified Entities, and to clarify who, upon such a merger, is the Affected Party, as per this comparison.

It then had quite the overhaul of Credit Event Upon Merger between 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA as this comparison illustrates.

Designated Event is part of the definition of Credit Event Upon Merger in the 2002 ISDA, and doesn’t have an equivalent in the 1992 ISDA nor, obviously enough,the 1987 ISDA.

The 2002 ISDA introduced the “Designated Event” in an attempt to define more forensically the sorts of corporate events that should be covered by CEUM. They are notoriously difficult to pin down. Even before the 2002 ISDA was published, it was common to upgrade the 1992 ISDA formulation to something resembling the glorious concoction that became Section 5(b)(v) of the 2002 ISDA. The 1992 wording is a bit lame. On the other hand, you could count the number of times an ISDA Master Agreement is closed out purely on account of Credit Event Upon Merger on the fingers of one hand, even if you had lost all the fingers on that hand to an industrial accident.

So — yeah.

Summary

Known among the cognoscenti as “CEUM”, the same way Tax Event Upon Merger is a “TEUM”. No idea how you pronounce it, but since ISDA ninjas communicate only in long, appended, multicoloured emails and never actually speak to each other, it doesn’t matter.

Pay attention to the interplay between this section and Section 7(a) (Transfer). You should not need to amend Section 7(a) (for example to require equivalence of credit quality of any transferee entity etc., because that is managed by CEUM.

Note also the interrelationship between CEUM and a Ratings Downgrade Additional Termination Event, should there be one. One can be forgiven for feeling a little ambivalent about CEUM because it is either caught by Ratings Downgrade or, if there is no requirement for a general Ratings Downgrade, insisting on CEUM seems a bit arbitrary (i.e. why do you care about a downgrade as a result of a merger, but not any other ratings downgrade?)

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 5(b)(v)

Comparisons

Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

Additional Termination Events: Other than the numbering discrepancy and a daring change of a “shall” to a “will”, Section 5(b)(vi) of the 2002 ISDA is the same as Section 5(b)(v) of the 1992 ISDA. That said, ATEs are likely to be the most haggled-over part of your ISDA Master Agreement.

Summary

Additional Termination Events are the other termination events your Credit department has dreamt up for this specific counterparty, that didn’t occur to the framers of the ISDA Master Agreement — or, at any rate, weren’t sufficiently universal to warrant being included in the ISDA Master Agreement for all. While the standard Termination Events tend to be “non-fault” events which justify termination of the relationship on economic grounds, but not on terms necessarily punitive to the Affected Party, Additional Termination Events are more “credit-y”, more susceptible of moral outrage, and as such more closely resemble Events of Default than Termination Events.

Common ones include:

• NAV triggers (for hedge funds)
• Key man provisions (for hedge funds)
• Investment manager insolvency or loss of licence
• Parent divestment (where counterparty is a financing subsidiary)

There is a — well, contrarian — school of thought that Additional Termination Events better serve the interests of the Ancient Guild of Contract Negotiators and the Worshipful Company of Credit Officers than they do the shareholders of the institutions for whom these artisans practise their craft, for in these days of zero-threshold CSAs, the real credit protections in the ISDA Master Agreement are the standard Events of Default (especially Failure to Pay or Deliver and Bankruptcy).

It’s a fair bet no-one in the organisation will have kept a record of how often you pulled NAV trigger. It may well be never.

“Ahh”, your credit officer will say, “but it gets the counterparty to the negotiating table”.

Hmmm.

Trick for young players

There is no Section 5(b)(vii) of the 2002 ISDA, nor a Section 5(b)(vi) under the 1992 ISDA and nor should you make one.

A “Termination Event” is defined as “an Illegality, a Tax Event or a Tax Event Upon Merger or, if specified to be applicable, a Credit Event Upon Merger or an Additional Termination Event”. Therefore, adding any new Termination Event must ALWAYS be achieved by labelling it a new “Additional Termination Event” under Section 5(b)(vi) (under the 2002 ISDA) or 5(b)(v) (under the 1992 ISDA), and not a separate new Termination Event under a new Section 5(b)(vii), or anything like that.

If you try to make it into a new “5(b)(vii)” it is therefore neither an “Illegality”, “Tax Event”, “Tax Event Upon Merger”, “Credit Event Upon Merger” nor an “Additional Termination Event”. Read literally, is will not be caught by the definition of “Termination Event” and none of the Section 6(b) Right to Terminate following Termination Event provisions will bite on it.

I mention this because I have seen it happen. Yes, you can take a “fair, large and liberal view” that what the parties intended was to create an ATE, but, in our age of anxiety, why suffer that one?

NAV trigger ATE

A NAV trigger is the right to terminate a master agreement as a result of the decline in net asset value of a hedge fund counterparty (other counterparty types generally won’t have a “net asset value” to trigger).

Like most events of default, NAV triggers are a second-order derivative for the only really important type of default: a failure to pay. A significant decline in NAV makes a payment default more likely. NAV declines in three main ways:

• The value of assets (be they physical or derivative) declines;
• The cost of financing those assets - the leverage - increases;
• Investors withdraw money from the fund.

Prime brokers hold initial margin to protect against the first, control the second in any weather, and one would expect the third to result in overall proportionate de-risking anyway. In any case, the benefit to a second order derivative close-out right is that it might allow you to get ahead of the game. If I know the default is coming (because NAV trigger, right?) why wait until a payment is due to see if I get hosed?

Because, in this age of high-frequency trading, multiple payments are due every day, and even if one isn’t, in many cases you can force one by raising initial margin. All told, an actual failure to pay is deterministic. There is no argument. A NAV trigger breach — not so much.

Especially since an official NAV is only “cut” once for every “liquidity period” — monthly or quarterly in most cases — and it is hard to see how a credit officer, however enthusiastic, could determine what the net asset value of the fund was at any other time, not having knowledge of those positions held with other counterparties. On the other hand, credit officers don’t usually monitor NAV triggers anyway, so what do they care?

Key person ATE

In a gaucher times called a key man, the key person — or people — are those in a small financial services organisation who provide the lion’s share of the brains and nowse. In a hedge fund, this means the two genius ex-Goldman trading whizz founding partners.

As long as these two chaps — they tend to be chaps, though the revolution is coming — still show up for work for their colossal paycheques, the future of the organisation is relatively assured. Should one of them or, God forbid both, gallivant off to their newly-acquired Caribbean islands to play with their respective collections of racing cars, they will leave behind a bunch of mediocre financial services hacks and bullshit artists with whom neither the fund’s erstwhile clients nor its trading counterparties will any longer wish to do business.

Hence the “key person clause”, entitling one to terminate a trading arrangement should the nominated key persons bugger off. If there is more than one nominated key person expect complications are around how many of them must leave before the clause can be triggered. Should it be all of them? Any of them? A simple majority?

Negotiating a key person clause can be a fascinating exercise. Here psychology conflicts with normal imperatives of risk management because, while key person clauses undoubtedly represent an Achilles heel for a hedge fund, they play so egregiously to the principals’ egos that most will be upset the not to be asked for one. There is no better validation of one’s self-worth, after all, than to be told that without your continued personal involvement a training relationship is worthless.

Details

MI by 2002
MI by 2002

PART III: SECTION 6 CLOSE OUT

MI by 2002
MI by 2002

Comparisons

Template:Isda 6(b)(i) comp

Section 6(b)(i): Notice

It starts off gently. If you are subject to a Termination Event — remember these are generally extraneous things beyond your control like Tax Events, Illegality, Force Majeure, for which you can’t really be blamed, but which affect your capacity to efficiently perform the agreement, so this is nothing really to be ashamed about, even though it might colour your counterparty’s view of carrying on — you must notify your counterparty.

Comparisons

Template:Isda 6(b)(ii) comp

Summary

Once the Waiting Period expires, it will be a Termination Event entitling either party to terminate some or all Affected Transactions. Partial termination is permitted because the impact on an event on each Transaction may differ from case to case (eg transactions forming part of a structured finance deal like a repack or a CDO) might not be easily replaced, so the disadvantages of terminating may outweigh the advantages.

As far as branches are concerned this is relatively uncontroversial, especially if yours is a multi-branch ISDA Master Agreement. But there is an interesting philosophical question here, for, without an express pre-existing contractual right to do so, a party may not unilaterally transfer its obligations under a contract to someone else. That, being a novation, requires the other party’s consent. This is deep contractual lore, predating the First Men and even the Children of the Woods. So if the Affected Party identifies an affiliate to whom it can transfer its rights and obligations, the Non-affected Party still may withhold consent. True, it is obliged to provide consent if its policies permit but — well — y’know. Polices? Given the credit department’s proclivities for the fantastical, it’s a fairly safe bet they’ll be able to find something if they don’t feel up to it.

That is to say, this commitment falls some wat short of the JC’s favourite confection: “in good faith and a commercially reasonable manner”.

Note also that if an Non-Affected Party does elect partial termination, the Affected Party has the right to terminate some or all of the remaining Transactions: this prevents Non-Affected Parties being opportunistic. Heaven forfend.

Section 6(b)(ii): Transfer to Avoid Termination Event

Things start to go a bit wobbly. You sense that ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ has been on the sauce, or marching powder or something, and became attached to the idea of trying to codify the unknowable future. It gets worse before it gets better but here the permutations are about the parties tax status: either the Tax law has changed for one or other party — a Tax Event — or a party has executed some fancy cross-border merger which has somehow changed its tax residence, status, or eligibility of favourable tax treatment: this is a Tax Event Upon Merger. Here, in essence, you have a little window to sort yourself out, if you hadn’t done that before the merger (isn’t that what Tax advisors are for, by the way?).

Tax Event Upon Merger is also apt to create magnificent rounds of three-dimensional ninja combat drafting, because there is an Affected Party, and a Burdened Party, and they are not ~ necessarily ~ the same, and that is even before you worry about what has happened if there is a Credit Event Upon Merger (could be, right? There is a merger... so why not?) and/or a Force Majeure going on at the same time.

In any case: the Affected Party of a simple Tax Event, or the Affected Party of a TEUM who is also the Burdened Party must try doggedly for twenty days to transfer its rights and obligations to an unaffected Office or Affiliate before it is allowed to trigger an Early Termination Date. In any case the innocent, Unaffected Party, has a varnished right to decline the transfer if it can’t trade with the designated transferee.

Comparisons

Template:Isda 6(b)(ii) comp

Summary

Once the Waiting Period expires, it will be a Termination Event entitling either party to terminate some or all Affected Transactions. Partial termination is permitted because the impact on an event on each Transaction may differ from case to case (eg transactions forming part of a structured finance deal like a repack or a CDO) might not be easily replaced, so the disadvantages of terminating may outweigh the advantages.

As far as branches are concerned this is relatively uncontroversial, especially if yours is a multi-branch ISDA Master Agreement. But there is an interesting philosophical question here, for, without an express pre-existing contractual right to do so, a party may not unilaterally transfer its obligations under a contract to someone else. That, being a novation, requires the other party’s consent. This is deep contractual lore, predating the First Men and even the Children of the Woods. So if the Affected Party identifies an affiliate to whom it can transfer its rights and obligations, the Non-affected Party still may withhold consent. True, it is obliged to provide consent if its policies permit but — well — y’know. Polices? Given the credit department’s proclivities for the fantastical, it’s a fairly safe bet they’ll be able to find something if they don’t feel up to it.

That is to say, this commitment falls some wat short of the JC’s favourite confection: “in good faith and a commercially reasonable manner”.

Note also that if an Non-Affected Party does elect partial termination, the Affected Party has the right to terminate some or all of the remaining Transactions: this prevents Non-Affected Parties being opportunistic. Heaven forfend.

Section 6(b)(ii): Transfer to Avoid Termination Event

Things start to go a bit wobbly. You sense that ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ has been on the sauce, or marching powder or something, and became attached to the idea of trying to codify the unknowable future. It gets worse before it gets better but here the permutations are about the parties tax status: either the Tax law has changed for one or other party — a Tax Event — or a party has executed some fancy cross-border merger which has somehow changed its tax residence, status, or eligibility of favourable tax treatment: this is a Tax Event Upon Merger. Here, in essence, you have a little window to sort yourself out, if you hadn’t done that before the merger (isn’t that what Tax advisors are for, by the way?).

Tax Event Upon Merger is also apt to create magnificent rounds of three-dimensional ninja combat drafting, because there is an Affected Party, and a Burdened Party, and they are not ~ necessarily ~ the same, and that is even before you worry about what has happened if there is a Credit Event Upon Merger (could be, right? There is a merger... so why not?) and/or a Force Majeure going on at the same time.

In any case: the Affected Party of a simple Tax Event, or the Affected Party of a TEUM who is also the Burdened Party must try doggedly for twenty days to transfer its rights and obligations to an unaffected Office or Affiliate before it is allowed to trigger an Early Termination Date. In any case the innocent, Unaffected Party, has a varnished right to decline the transfer if it can’t trade with the designated transferee.

Comparisons

Template:Isda 6(b)(iv) comp

Summary

What a beast. If you track it through in Nutshell™ terms, it isn’t as bad as it looks, but you have the ISDA ninja’s gift for over-complication, and ISDA’s crack drafting squad™’s yen for dismal drafting, to thank for this being the trial it is.

To make it easier, we’ve invented some concepts and taken a few liberties:

“Unaffected Transaction”, which saves you all that mucking around saying “Transactions other than those that are, or are deemed, to be Affected Transactions” and so on;

Termination Event Notice: An elegant and self-explanatory alternative to “after an Affected Party gives notice under Section 6(b)(i)”.

We take it as logically true that you can’t give 20 days’ notice of something which you then say will happen in fewer than 20 days. Therefore, there is no need for all this “designate a day not earlier than the day such notice is effective” nonsense.

So with that all out the way, here is how it works. Keep in mind that, unlike Events of Default, Termination Events can arise through no fault of the Affected Party and, therefore, are not always as apocalyptic in consequence. Depending what they are, they may be cured or worked-around, and dented Transactions that can’t be panel-beaten back into shape may be surgically excised, allowing the remainder of the ISDA Master Agreement, and all Unaffected Transactions under it, to carry on as normal. So here goes:

Divide up the types of Termination Event

Tax ones: If a Tax Event or a TEUM where the party merging is the one that suffers the tax, the parties have a month to try to rearrange matters between them, their offices and affiliates to avoid the tax issue. Only once that has failed are you in Termination Event territory. See Section 6(b)(ii) and 6(b)(iii).

Non-Affected Party ones: If it’s a CEUM, an ATE or a TEUM where the Non-Affected Party suffers the tax, then if the other guy is a Non-Affected Party, then (whether or not you are) you may designate an Early Termination date for the Affected Transactions.

Illegality and Force Majeure: Here, if you are on a 2002 ISDA, there may be a Waiting Period to sit through, to see whether the difficulty clears. For Force Majeure Event it is eight Local Business Days; for Illegality other than one preventing performance of a Credit Support Document: three Local Business Days. So, sit through it. Why is there exception for Illegality on a Credit Support Document? Because, even though it wasn’t your fault, illegality of a Credit Support Document profoundly changes your credit assessment (in a way that arguably, even a payment or delivery obligation doesn’t), and that is the most fundamental risk you are managing under the ISDA Master Agreement.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 6(b)(iv)

Details

MI by 2002
MI by 2002
MI by 2002
MI by 2002
==PART IV: BOILERPLATE MI by 2002
MI by 2002
MI by 2002

Comparisons

The first sentence is more or less the same in each version. Then the 2002 ISDA adds a lengthy disclaimer of any pre-contractual representations — presumably, not counting the express ones patiently documented in Section 3.

Summary

What you see is what you get, folks: if it ain’t written down in the ISDA Master Agreement, it don’t count, so no sneaky oral representations. But, anus matronae parvae malas leges faciunt, as we Latin freaks say: good luck in enforcing that if your counterparty is a little old lady.

Note also that liability for a fraudulent warranty or misrepresentation won’t be excluded. So if your oral representation or warranty is a bare-faced lie, the innocent party can maybe still rely on it in entering the agreement, even if it isn’t written down, though good luck parsing the universe of possible scenarios to figure out when that qualification might bite.

Smart-arse point: A warranty is a contractual assurance, made as part of a concluded contract, and cannot, logically, be relied on by the other party when entering into the contract. An assurance on which one relies when deciding to enter into a contract is a representation.

Confirmations

“This Agreement”, courtesy of how it is defined in Section 1(c), includes the ISDA Master pre-printed form, Schedule and each Confirmation entered into under it.

The entire agreement clause is legal boilerplate to nix any unwanted application of the parol evidence rule — to make sure one only cares for the four corners of the written agreement, and no extra-documentational squirrelling is allowed. Which might be a problem because the time-honoured understanding between all right-thinking derivatives trading folk is that the oral agreement, between the traders is the binding legal agreement, and not the subsequent confirmation, hammered out between middle office and operations folk after the trade is done. Hasten to Section 9(e)(ii) — the Confirmation is only evidence of the binding agreement. Could that be it?

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 9(a)

Comparisons

Template:Isda (b) comp

Summary

ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ takes a clause which didn’t really need to be said, and converts it into a monster. If we convert this to symbolic logic it must mean this:

Effective amendment or waiver =In writing AND [EITHER executed by each party OR confirmed by exchange of [EITHER Telex OR electronic message]]

“In writing” means recorded for posterity, in words ingestable by means of the eyes, as opposed to the ears. This is not the OED definition, I grant you — I made it up just now — but it zeroes in on the immutable fact that, whether it is on parchment, paper, cathode ray tube, LED screen or electronic reader, you take in writing by looking at it. Not “orally” — from the mouth — or for that matter, “aurally” — through the ears — nor, in the JC’s favourite example, via semaphore — by a chap waving flags from a distant hill — but in visible sentences, made up of visual words.

Sentences. Words. Mystic runes carved upon the very living rock. Anything else? Could “writing” include memes? GIFs? Emojis? We suppose so — but do you “write” them, as such? — but to the wider question “can communications apprehended visually but of a non-verbal nature be contractually significant?” the answer is undoubtedly yes.

Acceptance, to be legally binding, need not be “in writing”. Nor “orally”. Acceptance just needs to be clear. Whether one has accepted is a matter for the laws of evidence. There is little doubt that one who has signed, sealed and delivered a parchment deed by quill in counterpart has accepted its contents — it is about as good evidence as you could ask for, short of the fellow admitting it in cross-examination — but a merchant need not, and often does not, reach this gold standard when concluding commercial arrangements about town.

Who has not stumbled morosely into the newsagent of a Sunday morning, wordlessly pushed a copper across the counter and left with a copy of The Racing Post, not having exchanged as much as a glance with the proprietor? Do we doubt for an instant that a binding contract was formed during that terse interaction?

There is, in theory, a whole ecosystem of non-verbal communications — winks, nods, wags, shaken heads, facial tics and cocked eyebrows — and nor should we forget, those who stand on distant hills and communicate by smoke signal, Greek heroes who miscommunicate their safe return by sail colour or modern admirals who transmit instructions to the fleet using a flag sequence.

Any of these can, in theory, convey offer, acceptance and consideration as well can a written or oral communication.

Emojis

The King’s Bench of Saskatchewan — not an English court to be sure, but of persuasive value, especially when speaking this much sense — has recently affirmed the JC’s conviction about emojis 😬.

In an argument about whether a merchant was bound to supply a consignment of flax on the back of an exchange of SMS messages.

The plaintiff drew up a contract to purchase SWT 86 metric tonnes of flax from the defendant, wet-signed it, took a photo of the contract and texted the photo to the defendant with the text message: “Please confirm flax contract”.

The defendant texted back “👍”.

The defendant didn’t eventually deliver the flax, and by the time the plaintiff could source alternative flax prices had gone up. The plaintiff claimed damages.

The defendant argued the thumbs-up emoji simply confirmed that he received the Flax contract but was not acceptance of its terms. He claimed he was waiting for the full terms and conditions of the Flax Contract to review and sign. Partly on the basis of a prior course of dealing with deals done on monosyllabic text messages, the court wasn’t having it:

“This court readily acknowledges that a 👍 emoji is a non-traditional means to “sign” a document but nevertheless under these circumstances this was a valid way to convey the two purposes of a “signature” – to identify the signator ... and as I have found above – to convey ... acceptance of the flax contract.

I therefore find that under these circumstances that the provisions of [the Canadian Sale of Goods Act 1978] have been met and the flax contract is therefore enforceable. ”

Comparisons

Section 9(c) is identical as between 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA.

Summary

Netting and close-out

Why should this matter here? Well, because netting, in a word. Here the fabulous nuances of the ISDA Master Agreement come into play. Close-out netting — as we all know, a clever if somewhat artificial and, in practical application, quite tedious concept — is not something that just happens by operation of the common law. Set-off, which does, is a narrower and flakier thing requiring all kinds of mutuality that might not apply to your ISDA Master Agreement.

The contractual device of close-out netting, by contrast, relies on the patient midwifery of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ and the sophisticated contrivances they popped into the ISDA Master Agreement: especially the parts that say all Transactions form a Single Agreement, and those long and dusty passages in Section 6 which painfully recount how one terminates those Transactions and nets down all the resulting exposures should things go tits up.

Now, it really wouldn’t do if one were found to have thrown those clever legal artifacts on the fire before seeking the common law’s help to manage your way out of a portfolio with a busted counterparty would it. Section 9(c) is there to avoid the doubt that you might have done so: Just because you’ve declared an Early Termination Date, that doesn’t mean all bets are off. Just the live Transactions.

As far as the JC can see, through his fogged-up, purblind spectacles, this doubt, like most, didn’t need avoiding and shouldn’t have been present in the mind of a legal eagle of stout mental fortitude: it is clear on its face that terminating a transaction under pre-specified mechanism in the contract is not to cancel the contract and sue for damages, but to exercise an option arising under it, and all your mechanical firepower remains in place.

Indeed, there is no mechanism for terminating an ISDA Master Agreement itself, at all. Even in peace-time. This has led at least one commentator to hypothesise that this proves that derivatives trading is all some kind of Illuminati conspiracy.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 9(c)

Comparisons

This clause is identical in the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA.

Summary

Over the centuries the common law, as we know, has done a fine job of shaping and polishing a merchant’s remedies for breach of contract: — remedies which are, broadly, indifferent to what the contract happens to say.

The reason for that is simple: by the time a merchant comes to ask about its rights upon breach, the instrument that conferred them is broken.

Fruity expectations of a healthy, long and fecund forward relationship lie suffocating upon the salted earth. The contract is the proverbial “ex parrot”: it is no longer a reliable guide to how one should expect the other to behave. The defaulter is a defaulter and cannot be relied upon to do what she promised to do. So, nor is the aggrieved party be expected to carry on doggedly popping coppers in the slot: the common law asks that she conducts herself reasonably and with good faith in the circumstances; it does not demand a total want of common sense.

The sacred pact having fractured, it is for the court to draw upon its centuries of analogy to put the matters right.

It does that by reference to its own principles, not the contract’s: causation, contribution, foreseeability and determinacy of loss. the court applies these to the deal the suitor thought it had to work out a juridical compensation for its loss of bargain.

That is the magnificent furniture the laws of England bestow upon us. It seems counterproductive — passive aggressive, almost — for a party to insist, in detail, on what should happen its customer does not do it promises to do. Bloody-minded, almost.

Where the contract involves a bank, though — especially one that is lending you money — it is de rigueur. Banks like to rule out doubt, help themselves to extra rights: liens, set-off, netting of liabilities — banking contracts are a kind of research and development department where clever people contrive intricate clockwork escapements governing the grounds on which they deploy capital. Here “ex-parrotness” is the overriding mischief a lender seeks to manage, and legal eagles like to reinforce the ancient customary rules of contract.

It isn’t that the common law is no good; it is just that where you clearly foresee a specific breach, a contract can be better. The law of unintended consequences rules the world of finance, though, and it is not hard to imagine carefully drawn contractual terms working out worse than the general rules relating to fundamental breach. Hence this boilerplate: careful provisions designed to assist a wronged party should not be allowed to get in the way of general law of contract if it would work out to be better, and this slug of boilerplate is meant, to ensure — by means of contractual term — that they do not.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 9(d)

Comparisons

But for some finicking around at the margin — allowing Confirmations to be exchanged by telex, fax or email; that kind of thing — the 2002 ISDA is substantially the same as for the 1992 ISDA

Summary

In which the ISDA Master Agreement deals with the pointless topic of counterparts, and the workaday one of Confirmations.

Section 9(e)(i) Counterparts

There is an impassioned essay about the idiocy of counterparts clauses elsewhere. For now, just know this:

Black’s Law Dictionary has the following to say on counterparts:

“Where an instrument of conveyance, as a lease, is executed in parts, that is, by having several copies or duplicates made and interchangeably executed, that which is executed by the grantor is usually called the “original,” and the rest are “counterparts;” although, where all the parties execute every part, this renders them all originals.”

Sometimes it is important that more than one copy of a document is recognised as an “original” — for tax purposes, for example, or where “the agreement” must be formally lodged with a land registry. But these cases, involving the conveyance of real estate, are rare — non-existent, indeed, when the field you are ploughing overflows with flowering ISDA Master Agreements, confidentiality agreements and so on. If yours does — and if you are still reading, I can only assume it does, or you are otherwise at some kind of low psychological ebb — a “counterparts” clause is as useful to you as a chocolate tea-pot.

Indeed: even for land lawyers, all it does is sort out which, of a scrum of identical documents signed by different people, is the “original”. This is doubtless important if you are registering leases in land registries, or whatever other grim minutiae land lawyers care about — we banking lawyers have our own grim minutiae to obsess about, so you should forgive us for not giving a tinker’s cuss about yours, die Landadler.

ANYWAY — if your area of legal speciality doesn’t care which of your contracts is the “original” — and seeing as, Q.E.D., they’re identical, why should it? — a counterparts clause is a waste of trees. If the law decrees everyone has to sign the same physical bit of paper (and no legal proposition to our knowledge does, but let’s just say), a clause on that bit of paper saying that they don’t have to, is hardly going to help.

Mark it, nuncle: there is a chicken-and-egg problem here; a temporal paradox — and you know how the JC loves those. For if your contract could only be executed on several pieces of paper if the parties agreed that, then wouldn’t you need them all to sign an agreement, saying just that, on the same piece of paper? And since, to get that agreement, they will have to sign the same piece of paper, why don’t you just have done with it and have them all sign the same copy of the blessèd contract, while you are at it?

But was there ever a logical cul-de-sac so neat, so compelling, that it stopped a legal eagle insisting on stating it anyway, on pain of cratering the trade? There are little eaglets to feed, my friends.

Section 9(e)(ii) Confirmations

“Trade” versus “confirmation”: celebrity death-match

If a trader agrees one thing, and the confirmation the parties subsequently sign says another, which gives? A 15 second dealing-floor exchange on a crackly taped line, or the carefully-wrought ten page, counterpart-executed legal epistle that follows it?

The original oral trade prevails. As to why — we address that in the premium section.

Dare we mention ... email?

Note also the addition of e-mail as a means of communication to the 2002 ISDA (email not really having been a “thing” in 1992). This caused all kinds of fear and loathing among the judiciary, when asked about it, as can be seen in the frightful case of Greenclose v National Westminster Bank plc.Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Timely confirmation regulations and deemed consent

Both EMIR and Dodd Frank have timely confirmation requirements obliging parties to have confirmed their scratchy tape recordings within a short period (around 3 days). This fell out of a huge backlog in confirming structured credit derivatives trades following the Lehman collapse.

Roger Moore indahouse

Lastly, a rare opportunity to praise those maestros of legal word-wrangelry, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™. In Section 9(e)(ii), they contemplate that one might agree a Transaction “orally or otherwise”. This is a smidgen wider than the usual legal eagle formulation of orally or in writing. It shows that while the swaps whizzes were conservative about how to close out a Transaction, when putting one on you are constrained only by the bounds of your imagination and the limits of interpersonal ambiguity: not just written words, nor even oral ones, but the whole panoply of possible human communications: semaphore, naval flags, Morse code, waggled eyebrows, embarrassed smiles and any other kinds of physical gesture.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 9(e)

Comparisons

This clause is identical in the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA.

Summary

Waiver: a place where the laws of the New World and the Old diverge. Does one really need a contractual provision dealing with the consequences of a fellow’s good-natured indulgence when carrying on commerce under an ISDA Master Agreement? Those with an English qualification will snort, barking reference to Hughes v Metropolitan Railway and say this Section 9(f) is inconsequential fluff that goes without saying; those acquainted with the Uniform Commercial Code and the monstrous slabs of Manhattan will tread more carefully, lest they create a “course of dealing”.

Since the ISDA Master Agreement was designed with either legal system in mind, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ came up with something that would work in either. To be sure, it is calculated to offend literary stylists and those whose attention span favours minimalism amongst those who ply their trade in the old country, but it does no harm.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 9(f)

Comparisons

This clause is identical in the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA.

Summary

So suddenly, in Section 9(g) of all places, the members of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ wake up out of their collective fever dream, and this is what they say: It’s like, “okay, so we wrote them; we did put them here — hands up, we admit it — but we don’t mean anything by them”. And what is a fellow to make of the headings before Section 9 that, short days ago, being a logical fellow, I read, enjoyed and imbued with symbolic meaning? Am I supposed to just throw that crystalline construct away now? It just seems such a waste.

Don’t you just love lawyers?

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA 9(g)

Details

MI by 2002
MI by 2002
MI by 2002
MI by 2002
MI by 2002

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Additional Representation

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Additional Representation

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Additional Representation

Comparisons

Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

Additional Termination Events: Other than the numbering discrepancy and a daring change of a “shall” to a “will”, Section 5(b)(vi) of the 2002 ISDA is the same as Section 5(b)(v) of the 1992 ISDA. That said, ATEs are likely to be the most haggled-over part of your ISDA Master Agreement.

Summary

Additional Termination Events are the other termination events your Credit department has dreamt up for this specific counterparty, that didn’t occur to the framers of the ISDA Master Agreement — or, at any rate, weren’t sufficiently universal to warrant being included in the ISDA Master Agreement for all. While the standard Termination Events tend to be “non-fault” events which justify termination of the relationship on economic grounds, but not on terms necessarily punitive to the Affected Party, Additional Termination Events are more “credit-y”, more susceptible of moral outrage, and as such more closely resemble Events of Default than Termination Events.

Common ones include:

• NAV triggers (for hedge funds)
• Key man provisions (for hedge funds)
• Investment manager insolvency or loss of licence
• Parent divestment (where counterparty is a financing subsidiary)

There is a — well, contrarian — school of thought that Additional Termination Events better serve the interests of the Ancient Guild of Contract Negotiators and the Worshipful Company of Credit Officers than they do the shareholders of the institutions for whom these artisans practise their craft, for in these days of zero-threshold CSAs, the real credit protections in the ISDA Master Agreement are the standard Events of Default (especially Failure to Pay or Deliver and Bankruptcy).

It’s a fair bet no-one in the organisation will have kept a record of how often you pulled NAV trigger. It may well be never.

“Ahh”, your credit officer will say, “but it gets the counterparty to the negotiating table”.

Hmmm.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Additional Termination Event

Comparisons

Not even ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ could confect something worthwhile to say which might improve this Spartan piece of text. But note the concept of Affected Party is sprayed liberally throughout Section 5(b), and it means something different in almost every context so you’re guaranteed to have fun there.

Elsewhere there is much monkeying around as regards the concept of Illegality, particularly insofar as it relates to Credit Support Documents, and the newly introduced Force Majeure.

Summary

The Affected Party is the one who is subject to a Section 5(b) Termination Event, as opposed to the perpetrator of a Section 5(a) Event of Default — thus one of a marginally less opprobrious character, seeing as Termination Events are generally not considered to be one’s fault as such, but just regrettable things that happen that no-one expected, or wanted, but bring what was once a beautiful relationship to an end.

It’s not you, it’s — well, it’s not me either — it’s just that confounded tax event that occurred upon your recent merger.

Note that, in its wisdom, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ chose not to have a generic term for the sort of person who is subject to either a Termination Event or an Event of Default, so there is much “Defaulting Party and/or Affected Party, as the case may be” sort of malarkey. This depresses we prose stylists, but ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ has never cared about us, so we should hardly be surprised.

Practical differences between “Affected Party” and “Defaulting Party”

What is the practical, economic difference between being closed out on the same Transaction for an Event of Default and a Termination Event?

This is something that all ISDA ninjas know, or sort of intuit, in a sort of semi-conscious, buried-somewhere-deep-in-the-brain-stem kind of way, but they may mutter darkly and try to change the subject if you ask them to articulate it in simple English.

To be fair the topic might be chiefly of academic interest were it not for the unfortunate habit of the same “real world” event potentially comprising more than one variety of termination right. This leads to some laboured prioritisation in the ISDA, and sometimes some in the Schedule too. What if my Tax Event upon Merger is also a Credit Event Upon Merger and, for that matter, also a Force Majeure Event? That kind of question.

General discussion

The Definition of Close-out Amount

Remember the way a Determining Party values a Terminated Transaction is calculates its own close-out value — in our nutshell terms, “the losses the Determining Party would incur (positive) or gains it would realise (negative) in replacing the material terms and the option rights of the parties under a Terminated Transaction”. One assesses “the costs one would incur” from ones’ own side of the market. A large party of the question comes down to who the Determining Party is for a given termination event.

Defaulting Party

Under an Event of Default, it is the Non-Defaulting Party at all times (since on the theory of the game, the Defaulting Party is either a miscreant or a smoking hulk of twisted metal, there is no one else around to do this. Therefore, it being an Event of Default is always optimal for the Innocent Party, since it will always be the Determining Party.

One Affected Party

Where the terminating impetus is not so outrageous as to qualify as an Event of Default — i.e., it is only a Termination Event — but it only impacts one party, in most cases it is the same as for an Event of Default. There is one Affected Party, the Non-Affected Party is the sole Determining Party, so it closes out on its own side of the market ... unless the event in question is an Illegality or a Force Majeure Event, in which case there is a rider in Section 6(e)(ii)(3) applies and the Determining Party has to get mid market quotations that don’t take its own creditworthiness into account. But note that the most commonly triggered type of Termination Event is an Additional Termination Event, these tend to have a defaulty, turpidudinous character about them, almost never happen to two people at once, and therefore behave exactly like Events of Default.

Two Affected Parties

When both parties are affected — a scenario the ISDA only contemplates for Termination Events; Events of Default being more of a “she who draws first wins” sort of affair, where the first in time prevails — then each party is a “Determining Party” calculates its own close-out value — in our nutshell terms, “the losses the Determining Party would incur (positive) or gains it would realise (negative) in replacing the material terms and the option rights of the parties under a Terminated Transaction” — throws it into the ring and the Calculation Agent splits the difference. Assuming both parties calculate so the end result is necessarily a mid-market number.

All so confusing. If only there were someone to set it all out in a table for you.

Awwwwww.

JC’s cut-out-and-keep™ guide to terminating Transactions

Event	How many affected	What happens
Events of Default Q.E.D. there is only one Defaulting Party: 5(a)(i) Failure to Pay or Deliver 5(a)(ii) Breach of Agreement 5(a)(iii) Credit Support Default 5(a)(iv) Misrepresentation 5(a)(v) Default Under Specified Transaction 5(a)(vi) Cross Default 5(a)(vii) Bankruptcy 5(a)(viii) Merger without Assumption	Defaulting Party only	Non-defaulting Party calculates on its own side of market.
Termination Events where there is only one Affected Party And this odd rider in Section 6(e)(ii)(3) requiring a midmarket price does not apply: 5(b)(iii) Tax Event 5(b)(iv) Tax Event Upon Merger 5(b)(v) Credit Event Upon Merger 5(b)(vi) Additional Termination Event	One Affected Party only	Non-Affected Party calculates on its own side of market.
Termination Events where there is only one Affected Party but ... This odd rider in Section 6(e)(ii)(3) requiring a midmarket price does apply: 5(b)(i) Illegality 5(b)(ii) Force Majeure Event	One Affected Party only	Non-Affected Party seeks prices by reference to mid-market values and which do not reflect its own credit.
Termination Events where there are two Affected Parties 5(b)(i) Illegality 5(b)(ii) Force Majeure Event 5(b)(iii) Tax Event 5(b)(iv) Tax Event Upon Merger	Each party is an Affected Party	Both parties are Determining Parties, and Calculation Agent splits the difference ergo it is a midmarket rate.

In the heyday of ISDA negotiation just who was the Affected Party and how one should value and terminate an Affected Transaction used to be much more of a source of controversy than it is today.

This might be a function of the market’s general move to the 2002 ISDA closeout methodology, being far less fraught and bamboozling then the one in the 1992 ISDA, refraining as it does from absurdities like the First Method and alternative Market and Loss methods of valuing replacement transactions. Even those who insist on staying with the 1992 ISDA — Hello, Cleveland! — are often persuaded to upgrade the closeout methodology.

It might also be that the specific expertise as to what happens in a close out has dissipated over the years as swap dealers and investment managers have outsourced and downskilled their negotiation functions.

But the JC likes to think that in this mature market, the commercial imperative plays a part here. Termination Events come in two types: catastrophic ones, which signal the end of the relationship — and usually the ongoing viability of one of the counterparties — altogether; and Transaction-specific ones, which no-one intended or wanted, everyone regrets, but which will soon be water under the bridge, for parties who will continue to trade new derivatives into glorious, golden perpetuity.

Now any swap dealer who regards a Transaction-specific Termination Event as an opportunity to gouge its counterparty can expect a frosty reception next time its salespeople are pitching new trading axes to the CIO.

On the other hand if, when your valuation reaches her, the CIO is wandering around outside her building with an Iron Mountain box, she will be less bothered about the wantonness of your termination mark — it being no longer her problem — and as far as she does care about it all, will console herself with the reality that you are not likely to see much of that money anyway once her former employer’s insolvency estate has been wound up.

Comparisons

The provisions are identical but for reference to the newly added Force Majeure Termination Event and also a cheeky caveat relating to an Illegality or Force Majeure which affects only the Credit Support Document, and here the “leave no detail, however tiresome, unconsidered” department of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ caters for the eventuality that your Credit Support Document provides credit support for some, but not, all Transactions.

Summary

Seeing how third party credit support generally works under an ISDA Master Agreement — it only comes into play once Transactions have been closed out, and there are no Transactions left, Affected or otherwise this does seem a rather fussy detail; all the more so now in the age of regulatory variation margin. I mean, who provides credit support for individual Transactions under a master agreement specifically designed to achieve cross-transactional closeout netting?

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Affected Transactions

Summary

Affiliate is potentially wide: it could capture, for example, special purpose vehicles whose shareholding is owned by the same corporate service provider, or separate stand-alone hedge funds managed by the same administrator or investment manager.

An “affiliate” is really not a complicated idea in the abstract, yet in the world of commercial contracts, our learned friends rejoice in overdetermining it all the same. For these men and women, a “affiliate” of an undertaking could be:

• Parent: its parent or holding company, which holds all or a majority of its ordinary share capital — often abbreviated as a “holdco”
• Child: its subsidiary — a company the ordinary share capital of which it holds all or a majority
• Sibling: a company in common ownership with the corporate being; that is to say, a company that shares the same parent or holding company.

And that is about it. Pedants will be anxious to point out that, shares being the divisible ownership units that they are, and different degrees of control and voting rights attaching to different classes of share, there are degrees of ownership, and affiliation, and some imply more connectedness than others. Any confusion is usually resolved by pointing at the definition of “subsidiary” and “holding company” in the Companies Act, or similar legislation in a jurisdiction near you. The ISDA Master Agreement does a reasonably neat job of capturing the above by reference to the majority of voting control.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Affiliate

Comparisons

The “Agreement” is, broadly, the ISDA Master Agreement, the Schedule, any 1995 CSA and, in the context of any Transaction, its Confirmation. It generally would not include a Credit Support Document (except to the extent you treat your 1995 CSA, rightly or wrongly, as a Credit Support Document.

The ISDA Master Agreement

The ISDA Master Agreement is the basic framework which applies to anyone who touches down on planet ISDA. There are three existing versions:

• the state-of-the-art 2002 ISDA;
• the still-popular-with-traditionalists-and-Americans 1992 ISDA, and
• the all-but-retired-but-don’t-forget-there-are-still-soldiers-in-the-Burmese-jungle 1987 ISDA
• the interesting-only-for-its-place-in-the-fossil-record-and-witty-acrostic 1985 ISDA Code; and
• there isn’t a 2008 ISDA. That’s a little running JC in-joke.

All three versions have a tri-partite form: Pre-printed Master, Schedule and — well, this is controversial: for is it, or is it not, part of the ISDA Master Agreement? — Credit Support Annex. {{isda 1(c) summ {{{1}}}|{{{1}}}}}

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Agreement

Comparisons

This clause being new to the 2002 ISDA, there is no equivalent in the 1992 ISDA.

Summary

Truly from the I’m sorry I asked file — almost in the shoot me file. This whole game of pan-dimensional chess, with six different Applicable Close-out Rates to apply in different circumstances, is all just to work out how to accrue interest on Unpaid Amounts and Early Termination Amounts during the close-out process. Considering that the said payer of this Applicable Close-out Rate is, Q.E.D., a dead duck at the time, and is unlikely to be able to pay much of anything, let alone elevated penalty interest, it really should not have been this hard.

You get a strong sense that the pragmatists of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ — if there are any — had well and truly tuned out and gone to the bar by the ’squad got to this definition. Looking on the bright side, at least it doesn’t mention LIBOR.

Non-Default Rate

To compare with the definition of “Default Rate”:

“Default Rate” means a rate per annum equal to the cost (without proof or evidence of any actual cost) to the relevant payee (as certified by it) if it were to fund or of funding the relevant amount plus 1% per annum. [emphasis added]

Since there is no suggestion of deftly placing one’s thumb on the scale, as there is for the Default Rate, we need not have, here, a saucy discussion about the risks of being seen as a penalty.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Applicable Close-out Rate

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Applicable Deferral Rate

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Applicable Deferral Rate

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Applicable Deferral Rate

Comparisons

Those with a keen eye will notice that, but for the title, Section 6(a) of the 2002 ISDA is the same as Section 6(a) of the 1992 ISDA and, really, not a million miles away from the svelte form of Section 6(a) in the 1987 ISDA — look on that as the Broadcaster to the 1992’s Telecaster.

Summary

HAL 9000: Just a moment — just a moment — I just picked up a fault in the AET-87 Unit.

Frank Poole: What is it?

HAL 9000: It’s a device for optimising regulatory capital, but that’s not important right now.

David Bowman: What’s the problem, HAL?

HAL 9000: It’s going to go one hundred per cent. failure, within 72 hours.

Poole: Surely, you can’t be serious?

HAL 9000: I am serious. And don’t call me “Shirley”.

Bowman: (sticking to the script) I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL?

Cue musical introduction

HAL9000: Well, I’ll tell you.

Chorus: He’s going to tell!
He’s going to tell!
He’s going to tell!
He’s going to tell! —

Poole: Stop that! Stop that! No singing!

Carries on for three hours in this vein

—Monty Python and the Magnetic Anomaly from Airplane!

Automatic Early Termination — colloquially, “AET”, but not to be confused with “ATE” (Additional Termination Event) or “ETA” (Early Termination Amount) — is an odd, feared and misunderstood concept buried at the back end of Section 6(a) (Right to Terminate Following Event of Default).

In a document stuffed with arcanities, Automatic Early Termination is especially abstruse, so if you are hitting this article cold then, firstly: what the hell are you doing; and secondly some background reading is in order:

Recommended background reading

• Bankruptcy phase transition: The difference between insolvency and bankruptcy and why the phase transition between them is a weird dreamtime that freaks derivatives lawyers out.
• Bankruptcy shenanigans and why they present a unique problem for derivatives counterparties that normal creditors are less bothered about.
• Single Agreement: The unbearable weirdness of ISDA’s single agreement concept.
• Regulatory capital: The rules on how much capital a regulated financial institution is required to hold, and how that is calculated.
• Closing out an ISDA: The law and lore of closing out an ISDA
• Flawed asset: ISDA’s notorious “flawed asset” provision: Section 2(a)(iii).

Automatic Early Termination provision is triggered when a party to whom it applies suffers an in-scope Bankruptcy Event of Default. If it is triggered, all outstanding Transactions are instantly and automatically terminated, without the need for any action by — or even the knowledge of — the Non-Defaulting Party. This usually means instantly, but in one case, it is even quicker than that.

If the Bankruptcy event is the presentation to the court by a creditor of a formal petition seeking the entity’s bankruptcy under Section 5(a)(vii)(4) — let us call this a “bankruptcy petition”, some creative warping of lexophysical swaptime is required. We will discuss this at some length and with wistful pedantry, in the premium content section.

In taking things out of the Non-Defaulting Party’s hands, AET subverts the normal order of things under the ISDA Master Agreement. Normally, the Non-Defaulting Party is in control. It may, but need not, call an Event of Default if the circumstances justifying one exist. AET is, well, automatic. It even obliterates the Non-Defaulting Party’s right to waive designation of an Event of Default, since by the time it is in a position to do so, the Event Default has already been declared.

(Could a NDP pre-waive in anticipation? See “Anticipatory waiver?” in the premium section.)

JC’s view is that Automatic Early Termination is a bad solution to an unlikely problem, but since it is embedded in every ISDA on the planet, and remains present in the minds of those who mandate capital calculations, we are stuck with it.

The theory

“Formal bankruptcy is a “phase transition”: the whole “legal context” surrounding a company changes. Erstwhile certainties vanish: normal rules of contract, debt and credit are suspended; in their place arise uncontrollable vagaries. The court appoints a bankruptcy administrator and invests her with wide, nightmarish discretions to do as she pleases, within reason, to sort out who gets what while ensuring the right thing is done by all the bankrupt’s creditors, customers, employees and, if there is anything left, shareholders. All, therefore, must fall upon her mercy”

—The phase transition of bankruptcy

Where a Defaulting Party’s bankruptcy regime allows its administrator to suspend its contractual terms or cherry-pick which of its Transactions to honour, it would help the Non-Defaulting Party if the ISDA were to automatically terminate before that phase transition occurred. To be safe, termination should happen at the exact moment — or even an infinitesimal moment before — that bankruptcy regime comes to life.

Bankruptcy shenanigans could affect a Non-Defaulting Party’s rights in at least two ways: Firstly, it may prevent it closing out Transactions at all. The bankruptcy administrator may have the discretion to affirm or avoid individual Transactions. This bigly messes with the fundamental philosophy of the ISDA Master Agreement.

Secondly, it may impact netting rights: a party having exercised its close-out right, ISDA’s “single agreement” operates to net all Transaction exposures down to a single sum. If a bankruptcy administrator is allowed to enforce some Transactions and set aside others — that is, to “cherry-pick” — that netting right is compromised, especially if the administrator has tactically DK’d only your profitable trades.

History

We rarely look back to the 1987 ISDA these days; few Burmese Junglers remain out there fighting the good fight, but sometimes the fossil record gives us purchase on the state of modern biology all the same. So it is with Automatic Early Termination which was introduced, uncredited, in the 1987 ISDA.

Bear in mind the broad sweep of three historical trends that converged in the 1980s.

Financialisation

First, the rapid onset of financialisation of, well, everything, due to parallel developments in information technology. Through the Seventies and Eighties, Western markets acquired the mental habits and technical systems they needed to look at financial risk in a much more detailed, segmentable way: as “substrate-neutral” derivatives of real-world propositions.

Financial instruments traded electronically. Increasingly, institutions modelled their risk with computers. They unbundled big, organic, ineffable risks into discrete tradable components: first, market risk and credit risk. Then into more esoteric measures: volatility. Liquidity. Convexity. Correlation. Credit and debt value.

At the same time, the market developed the legal and contractual tools to implement this new way of thinking about risks. Principle among them was a new class of bilateral financial contracts unlike anything the world had seen before, in which the usual master-slave relationship between creditors and debtors and between bankers and their customers were rendered — apparently — moot. There was no lender or borrower. The parties were equals: traders.

The ISDA Master Agreement was at the vanguard of these new bilateral contracts.

At the same time, powered by the same irrepressible forces of modernity, the market internationalised. Reducing financial instruments to electronic impulses made cross-border trade easier. While central banks could manage prudential supervision in their own jurisdictions, it was difficult for them to do it across global financial markets where different regulatory regimes presented all kinds of arbitrage opportunities.

New capital regulation

These developments in banking and market technology called for a more sophisticated framework for managing institutional risk in the global markets. Banks were increasingly interconnected, both across exchanges and in private over-the-counter markets, and the speed at which they traded, and at which trading values fluctuated, meant there was heightened systemic risk should major institutions get into trouble. The Latin American debt crisis was a case in point. Even smaller participants could have a disproportionate effect on system stability. We saw this, a bit later, when the brainbox-stuffed pioneering relative value arbitrage hedge fund Long Term Capital Management blew up and almost took Western banking civilisation with it. Some would say that would have been no bad thing.

At the same time the innovative financial instruments, which tended to be leveraged and shared few of the characteristics of traditional financial instruments, meant effective capital ratios at financial institutions declined over the 1980s. It became apparent that the worst-case loss scenario for a master trading agreement like the ISDA was orders of magnitude greater than that presented by exposure to, for example, a syndicated loan. As a result, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision introduced harmonised global standards for the capital treatment of financial instruments, including these new swap contracts. These rules, now known as Basel I, were first published in 1986. The following year, the 1987 ISDA arrived.

Corporate resolution didn’t change

While there was a good deal of harmony in the international capital markets, many domestic bankruptcy regimes — which were targeted at small and medium-sized enterprises and typically did not have such an international focus — did not similarly change or update.

Swaps remained an arcane part of the international capital markets. They were not relevant to the SMEs. Companies regulators, assignees and administrators did not well understand them, or how they worked. Having local tax and employment liabilities and “trade credit” arrangements in mind, Bankruptcy regimes tended to confer broad discretions on receivers and liquidators to ensure fair outcomes for all claimants upon a company’s resolution.

But broad discretion means lack of certainty, and financial markets do not like uncertainty. Especially not for highly unusual, levered arrangements like swaps, which are not by nature creditor-debtor arrangements. Should an administrator try to “cherry-pick” the in-the-money transactions in a swap portfolio, the implications for swap dealers — who had only entered into them at all on the assumption that all exposures, positive and negative, would net down to a single number — could be far worse, and far more volatile, than the corresponding risks presented by an ordinary loan or trade invoice.

Basel I addressed this “local insolvency risk” by requiring swap dealers to obtain written and reasoned legal opinions that, under local bankruptcy rules, their master agreements could not be cherry-picked in this way. that the “single agreement” concept would work, and their rights to apply close-out netting would be respected.

And this is where the phase transition into bankruptcy becomes important. Typically, while a company is still solvent and trading in the ordinary course, its master trading agreements may be enforced, and netted, according to their terms. It is only at the point of formal bankruptcy that the phantom shenanigans of wide-ranging equitable discretion hove into view. In some jurisdictions, the point at which everything changes is a split second, and getting the right side of it makes all the difference.

Insolvency versus bankruptcy

As we note elsewhere, there is common confusion between the accounting status of “insolvency”, which has no formal legal status and therefore makes no particular difference to the effectiveness of netting, and the legal status of “bankruptcy”, which does. Mere insolvency may lead to bankruptcy, but need not: they are different concepts and have different legal implications (in that bankruptcy has some, insolvency does not). Only once you are into formal bankruptcy are bankruptcy shenanigans on the cards.

ISDA’s definition of “Bankruptcy” somewhat jumbles the concepts up. Some ISDA Bankruptcy events (especially cashflow/balance sheet insolvency and composition with creditors) are “pre-phase transition events”, are not really observable, nor are they accompanied by formal changes in the application of laws of contract and should not trigger Automatic Early Termination.

1987: a blunt instrument

In the 1987 ISDA they do anyway. Automatic Early Termination applies across the board, to all Bankruptcy events, and all counterparties: it is not even an optional election, to be engaged judiciously when needed. It just sits there and applies across the board if any Bankruptcy Event of Default should be declared. You could engineer your Schedule to disable it, but this would require initiative.

This presented a real risk of indeterminacy, where the facts triggering an insolvency-style Bankruptcy were not public or even easily determinable. How are you meant to know whether your counterparty is balance sheet insolvent? Even for the company’s own accountants, this is more a matter of art than science. If mere insolvency triggered AET, it would be impossible to know whether a given ISDA was alive or dead. And that is before you even consider the impact of Section 2(a)(iii).

There is this weird thing: Automatic Early Termination could be triggered without notice, action or knowledge, and that would trigger a section 2(a)(iii) suspension, also without notice, action or knowledge. In that case, it is hard to see what to make of unexplained non-performance by your counterparty under the contract. Was it bankrupt? Or did it think you were bankrupt?

1992: Slow reverse-ferret

The history since 1987 has been to slow-walk AET back — not nearly fast enough, in this commentator’s opinion — from that highly unsatisfactory epistemological state. By 1992, AET excluded the “soft” economic insolvency events and was limited to circumstances with a live risk of bankruptcy shenanigans.

The 1992 ISDA also converted AET into an optional election in Part 1 of the Schedule. For most parties, in most jurisdictions, it stays off.

2002: grace periods tighten

In 2002 a further refinement was implemented in the definition of “bankruptcy petition”. ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ split Section 5(a)(vii)(4) in two: a bankruptcy petition instituted by a regulator is not subject to a grace period; one instituted by anyone else — such as a creditor — would only mature into an Event of Default if ordered by the Court, or not otherwise discharged within a 15-day grace period — down from the 30 days in the 1992 ISDA.

If a regulator is taking formal action against you, the game is certainly up. A grace period here serves no real purpose. A mere creditor doing so may be little more than a rather brusque debt-collection tactic: it may not indicate any genuine concern about a party’s ability to pay its debts, but rather be a pointed hurry-up. In that case, a bankruptcy petition can be fairly easily discharged. Hence the grace period.

Few and far between

As it stands there are only a few counterparty types in a few jurisdictions where the conditions for AET prevail. There are not many because — let’s be clear, here — AET is a bit of try on: any self-respecting netting-hostile bankruptcy regime ought to see straight through it.

It is, after all, a piece of time-travelling contractual magic — it deems Transactions to have terminated, without anyone’s knowledge or action, the instant before the event that, on expiry of a grace period would later trigger it, to avoid the ambit of discretionary rules designed to ensure fairness and prevent just that kind of preference. Expecting this to work very often seems a bit optimistic.

There is a more benign view, but it is still a bit hopeful: Automatic Early Termination helps deliver the appropriate outcome, dispelling residual doubt about ambiguous or untested regulatory provisions that were never intended to allow bankruptcy shenanigans, but that were crafted without the sui generis use case of the master trading agreement in mind. On this view, AET is a sort of “better be safe than sorry” gambit.

Then there is a pragmatic view. This is blunter: ISDA Master Agreements once were weird innovations that bamboozled and (wrongly) outraged bankruptcy administrators. Nowadays, they are not. Everyone knows what ISDAs are, why they net, why the “single agreement” concept is a sensible plank in the capital structure of the financial system, and why the bankruptcy shenanigans AET seeks to avoid would not produce a fair result for anyone.

This is all well and good. But if, unwittingly, Automatic Early Termination now creates practical risks where once it avoided theoretical ones, it still should be a source of concern. In JC’s view, it does.

We will talk about that at great length in the premium section.

Tedious but harmless drafting tweaks

Even for the Non-Defaulting Party, AET is a necessary evil. It leaves the Non-Defaulting Party at risk of being un-hedged on a portfolio of Transactions that automatically terminated effective as of a Bankruptcy event without the NDP knowing that the Bankruptcy event had happened. The NDP may want to capture the market risk between the Bankruptcy event and the date on which they should have known about it, and factor that into the Close-out Amount. If they do, expect to see language like the below.

If you are an AET counterparty, your credit officer may bridle at the sight of this, but you can reassure her that at any point where this language comes into play she will be wandering around outside in a daze clutching an Iron Mountain box full of gonks, comedy pencils and deal tomb-stones, and contemplating a career reboot as a maths teacher, so she shouldn’t really care anyway.

Adjustment for Automatic Early Termination: If an Early Termination Date occurs following an Automatic Early Termination event, the Early Termination Amount will adjusted to reflect movements in rates or prices between that Early Termination Date and the date on which the Non Defaulting Party should reasonably have become aware of the occurrence of the Automatic Early Termination.

Switzerland

Switzerland is — isn’t it always? — different, and a good place to go right now would be the Swiss bankruptcy language page. Switzerland itself is also a good place to go, especially in the skiing season. The JC loves Wengen.

AET under the 1987 ISDA

Note the somewhat difficult position for AET under the 1987 ISDA - a fuller discussion at that article - which was part of the reason for the move to the 1992 ISDA in the first place.

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Burdened Party

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Burdened Party

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Burdened Party

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Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Change in Tax Law

Summary

So one mild observation here is that this definition of a “Change in Tax Law” does not specifically mention, you know, tax per se. Which at first glance is odd.

This transpires not to matter, though, seeing as Change in Tax Law appears only twice in the 2002 ISDA, and in each case the context in which it appears is very specific to tax. They are:

• Section 2(d)(4)(B) (which deals with exclusions to the general requirement to gross up for Indemnifiable Taxes; and
• Section 5(b)(iii) (Tax Events), defining things that count as Tax Events by making an Affected Party more likely to suffer an Indemnifiable Tax.

The provisions surrounding gross up and termination and Indemnifiable Taxes are some of the most (linguistically) complicated in the ISDA Master Agreement, by the way.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Change in Tax Law

Comparisons

ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ introduced the Close-out Amount into the 2002 ISDA to correct the total trainwreck of a close-out methodology set out in the 1992 ISDA.

So the dirty secret is that there isn’t a “Close-out Amount” as such under a 1992 ISDA (or the 1987 ISDA) but, in places on this wiki, we’ll refer to one anyway, because it is better, more elegant, more stylish prose than

“... the amount determined following early termination of a Terminated Transaction using Market Quotation or Loss (as the case may be) and the Second Method, seeing as no-one in their right mind would agree to the First Method, under the 1992 ISDA”.

In the context of a 1992 ISDA that is what we mean by “Close-out Amount”.

Key differences

Well, there are some significant differences between Close-out Amount and Loss/Market Quotation under the 1992 ISDA, and we go into these in more detail in the premium section Close-out Amount v Loss/MQ showdown.

Summary

In the “good old days” of the 1992 ISDA, you valued Terminated Transactions according to Market Quotation or Loss and those un-intuitive and — well,in the case of the first, flat-out nutso — “First” and “Second” Methods. There is a “Settlement Amount” concept under the 1992 ISDA, but it only really relates to Market Quotation.

Note the prominent requirement to achieve a “reasonable” (1992 ISDA) or “commercially reasonable” (2002 ISDA) result. On what that latter lovely expression means see Barclays v Unicredit. Spoiler: it’s basically good for brokers, as long as they aren’t being total dicks.

On the difference between an “Early Termination Amount” and a “Close-out Amount”

Regrettably, the 1992 ISDA features neither an Early Termination Amount nor a Close-out Amount. The 2002 ISDA has both, which looks like rather an indulgence until you realise that they do different things.

A Close-out Amount is the termination value for a single Transaction, or a related group of Transactions that a Non-Defaulting Party or Non-Affected Party calculates while closing out an 2002 ISDA, but it is not the final, overall sum due under the ISDA Master Agreement itself. Each of the determined Transaction Close-out Amounts summed with the various Unpaid Amounts to arrive at the Early Termination Amount, which is the total net sum due under the ISDA Master Agreement after the close-out process. (See Section 6(e)(i) for more on that).

General discussion

For a step-by-step guide to closing out an ISDA Master Agreement see Section 6(a).

The 2002 ISDA does away with specific references to Market Quotation and “Reference Market-makers” but they are still, somewhat, germane thanks to the references to “quotations (either firm or indicative) for replacement transactions supplied by one or more third parties”.

The quaint notion that a dealer poll would, at the point when needed, actually do anything was laid to rest in the 2023 case of Lehman Brothers International (Europe) v AG Financial Products, Inc. which involved the closeout and valuation of a 1992 ISDA following Lehman’s collapse.

This case is an object less on for many unacknowledged facts about derivatives trading — such as that cases involving seemingly tried and tested aspects of close-out methodology get litigated at all, let alone that they take 15 years to get to judgment — but the standout point is the forlorn pointlessness of convening dealer polls.

From Crane J’s factual summary:

In accordance with its responsibilities under the ISDA Master Agreement, following its declaration of an event of default, Assured engaged the assistance of Henderson Global Investors, Ltd. (Henderson), to conduct an auction so that it could satisfy the ISDA Market Quotation process. Henderson contacted 11 potential bidders in advance of the auction that took place on September 16, 2009. Not one bid was received.

LBIE did manage to get some indicative bids that were, expert witnesses thought “indicative market data of where these transactions, these underlyings would be trading at that stage on termination date”. But not one of them was prepared to make a binding offer, and the most fulsome indicative bid was disclaimed up the wazoo:

“This is not investment advice of any kind and we do not purport any degree of accuracy in these levels.”

Useless, you would think, as an input in determining a fair market level. Indeed, internal LBIE emails — kids, if you learn one sodding lesson from the history of financial market disaster let it be “don’t put your darkest thoughts in emails to your buddies” — suggested they only wanted indicative bids to encourage other banks (many may have had similar trades on their books as LBIE), to make any bid, so that LBIE could then argue there was a market price:

“any color is good color to us and [JP Morgan employee] is lobbying for [JP Morgan’s US trading team] to at least put a number on it even if it is zero”.

Crane J notes, somewhat drily: “This raises the concern that LBIE’s goal, with respect to the indicative bids, was to make these trades seem as worthless as possible to then be able to collect the most from Assured in a lawsuit.”

So here are some things to bear in mind before reaching for a dealer poll to unblock a negotiation that is stuck on valuation:

Firstly, at the point you are likely to be arguing about it, everyone’s hair — yours, the counterparty’s and the rest of the market’s — hair will be on fire. Prices will be yoyoing around and most people will be focussed on their own book and won’t care about yours. Imagine your reference dealer is sitting on one of those mechanical bucking broncos. At the moment you ask for a firm bid on your portfolio — that, by the way, you don’t intend to hit — someone switched the bronco on full.

Secondly, since it has nothing to gain from providing a price — you want “price discovery”, not an actual trade, remember — no dealer in its right mind will give you one. Best case scenario it is distracted from managing its own book while bronco machine is on max. Less edifying ones are that it could get called as a witness in the litigation that is bound to follow or, God forbid, joined as a defendant in it. All your incautious bloomies are suddenly discoverable before an unsympathetic court.

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Confirmation

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Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Confirmation

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Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Confirmation

Comparisons

You might wonder whether this term really needed definition, and what calamity might have befallen the derivatives world had it not been created. Go on; go on, oh ye mighty ninjas: write in and tell me. I’m all ears.

Summary

If you are the sort of person you wonders whether the word “consent” includes permission, approval, regulatory authorisation or other general expression of acquiesence, and especially if you conclude it might not, this is the clause for you.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA consent

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Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Contractual Currency

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Contractual Currency

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Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Contractual Currency

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Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Convention Court

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Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Convention Court

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Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

First established in the 1987 ISDA, CEUM was gently upgraded for the 1992 ISDA to include Credit Support Providers and Specified Entities, and to clarify who, upon such a merger, is the Affected Party, as per this comparison.

It then had quite the overhaul of Credit Event Upon Merger between 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA as this comparison illustrates.

Designated Event is part of the definition of Credit Event Upon Merger in the 2002 ISDA, and doesn’t have an equivalent in the 1992 ISDA nor, obviously enough,the 1987 ISDA.

The 2002 ISDA introduced the “Designated Event” in an attempt to define more forensically the sorts of corporate events that should be covered by CEUM. They are notoriously difficult to pin down. Even before the 2002 ISDA was published, it was common to upgrade the 1992 ISDA formulation to something resembling the glorious concoction that became Section 5(b)(v) of the 2002 ISDA. The 1992 wording is a bit lame. On the other hand, you could count the number of times an ISDA Master Agreement is closed out purely on account of Credit Event Upon Merger on the fingers of one hand, even if you had lost all the fingers on that hand to an industrial accident.

So — yeah.

Summary

Known among the cognoscenti as “CEUM”, the same way Tax Event Upon Merger is a “TEUM”. No idea how you pronounce it, but since ISDA ninjas communicate only in long, appended, multicoloured emails and never actually speak to each other, it doesn’t matter.

Pay attention to the interplay between this section and Section 7(a) (Transfer). You should not need to amend Section 7(a) (for example to require equivalence of credit quality of any transferee entity etc., because that is managed by CEUM.

Note also the interrelationship between CEUM and a Ratings Downgrade Additional Termination Event, should there be one. One can be forgiven for feeling a little ambivalent about CEUM because it is either caught by Ratings Downgrade or, if there is no requirement for a general Ratings Downgrade, insisting on CEUM seems a bit arbitrary (i.e. why do you care about a downgrade as a result of a merger, but not any other ratings downgrade?)

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Credit Event Upon Merger

Comparisons

No changes between the versions of this rather unnecessary definition. The men and women of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ must have stood back and admired the handiwork of their 1992 forebears, high-fived each other and gone, “nice job, dudes and dudettes”.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Credit Support Document

Summary

A Credit Support Provider is basically a guarantor: a third party who stands being the obligations of a counterparty to the ISDA Master Agreement. Usually this is someone providing an all obligations guarantee or a standby letter of credit, but on rare occasions — very rare, usually involving espievies — might be a third party directly posting credit support to the other party under a Credit Support Document. In any case it is not a direct counterparty to the ISDA Master Agreement itself, whether or not the CSA counts as a Credit Support Document.

Given that a 1995 CSA is not a Credit Support Document at all, but a Transaction under the ISDA Master Agreement, a party to it is obviously not a Credit Support Provider.

A 1994 NY CSA, on the other hand, is a Credit Support Document though. So should a Party to the ISDA Master Agreement, where there is a 1994 NY CSA, be described as a “Credit Support Provider"?

No, sayeth the User’s Guide to the 1994 NY CSA:

“Parties to an ISDA Master Agreement should not, however, be identified as Credit Support Providers with respect to the Annex, as such term is intended only to apply to third parties.”

the Users’ Guide to the 2002 ISDA is similarly emphatically vague:

“The meaning of “Credit Support Provider” ... should apply to any person or entity (other than either party) providing, or a party to, a Credit Support Document delivered on behalf of a particular party.”

This means that a New York Law CSA — which is not a Transaction under the ISDA architecture, remember, is a Credit Support Document, but the person providing Credit Support under it — is not a “Credit Support Provider”?

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Credit Support Provider

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Cross-Default

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Cross-Default

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Cross-Default

Comparisons

A “Defaulting Party” is one who has committed or suffered, and a “Non-defaulting Party” is one who is not implicated in the commission or sufferance of, an Event of Default. There is something judgmental and contemptuous about a defaulter, that there isn’t about one who is merely affected.

Summary

The key thing to notice here is that — in an uncharacteristically rather neat, understated bit of drafting — Defaulting Party encapsulates a party who has itself defaulted, or whose Credit Support Provider or Specified Entity has committed an act which amounts to an Event of Default for that counterparty to this ISDA Master Agreement. I know, I know, this doesn’t seem that big of a deal: this sort of thing that should be plain, obvious and go without saying — but it saves you a job when, in your peregrinations round the party’s Confirmation, you come to talk of pending Events of Default and Termination Events agaisnt that party.

Instead of saying, laboriously, i“f there is an Event of Default or Termination Event with respect to a party or its Credit Support Providers or Specified Entities, as the case may be” you can speak of a Defaulting Party or an Affected Party.

Of course, it would be nice if there was a catch all for a party who has committed an Event of Default or suffered a Termination Event, so you didn’t need to go “Defaulting Party or Affected Party, as the case may be” — cheekily we suggest “Innocent Party” and “Implicated Party” (“Guilty Party”, though fun, isn’t quite right, seeing as Termination Events aren’t meant to impute any kind of culpability).

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Defaulting Party

General discussion

All or substantially all is a modifier calculated to snooker that smart Alec who, for example, sells his entire business barring a single chair, to avoid breaching a covenant preventing him from disposing of “all of the business”. This is not the behaviour of a good egg and the better question to ask yourself is why you did business with him in the first place.

In any case, your qualifier leads only to a different kind of uncertainty: what counts as “substantial”? Discussions on the in-any-case tedious topic of Credit Event Upon Merger and Merger Without Assumption tend quickly to go this way. The countless learned articles and client briefing notes on the topic (let me Google that for you) will tell you that the benefit of this kind of drafting accrues mainly to those in the legal profession, but even then only through their very fear and loathing of the notion.

Comparisons

You want to spend your time looking at Close-out Amount, and, by way of comparison, the magnificent contrivance that was the 1992 ISDA’s equivalent, Loss or Market Quotation. There was no “Determining Party” concept in the 1992 ISDA.

Summary

Not to be confused with a Determining Party for the purposes of the Equity Derivatives definitions, of course. Right?

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Determining Party

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Early Termination Amount

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Early Termination Amount

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Early Termination Amount

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Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Early Termination Date

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Early Termination Date

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Early Termination Date

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No equivalent definition in the 1992 ISDA. There wasn’t really such a thing as email back then.

Summary

An innocuous definition you would think but you would be wrong. For behold: an electronic message excludes e-mail. This was a persuasive factor in the learned judge’s idiosyncratic reasoning in the great case of Greenclose v National Westminster Bank plc, a case that illustrates the point that little old ladies make bad law.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA electronic messages

Comparisons

The expression “English law” is used, but not defined in the 1992 ISDA. It is defined in the 2002 ISDA, though curiously with a lower case “l” for “law”, and is useful as a toggle in the Governing Law clause, and to default to a Termination Currency if you have forgotten to provide one (for English law, the default Termination Currency is ... euro ... ouch ouch ouch can you imagine how UKIP must feel about that?), but not necessarily something that is going to move the world, even if the political and juridical subdivisions of what they used to call Albion are an utter Zodiac Mindwarp if you are careless enough to investigate them for a while. And no, Brexit means Brexit did not help.

Summary

Though there are some British Isles, seeing as they include the Republic of Ireland, there is no British law. Though there is a Great Britain — being the largest of the British Isles: the one with England, Scotland and Wales on it — there is no law of Great Britain. Though the political entity is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, there is no UK law. The Scots do their own thing. And let us not get into how the Anglo memeplex is represented in the world’s sporting tournaments.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA English law

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Event of Default

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Event of Default

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Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Event of Default

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Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Force Majeure Event

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Force Majeure Event

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Force Majeure Event

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA General Business Day

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA General Business Day

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Template:M gen 2002 ISDA General Business Day

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Illegality

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Illegality

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Illegality

Comparisons

The joyous expression first found voice in the 1987 ISDA and somewhat undercuts JC’spet theory that the absurd prolixity of modern commercial drafting is the fault of word processing. There wasn’t any word processing in 1986. It was all typewriters, carbon paper and Tipp-Ex.

Anyhow, you would like to think as the generations rolled on ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ could do something to improve a passage with a quintuple negative, wouldn’t you? Even, if, bloody-mindedly, to add a sixth negative, just to underline how scanty is the damn they give about the neurotic whinings of those, like JC, who are always simpering on about more economical expressions. In your face, prose stylists, such a stance might say. Actually, since I’m here, have a fricking seventh negative, punk, and brand it on your forehead so all who look upon you will know who it was who schooled you.

We can but dream, possums. We can only imagine what might have been. but no; they left the ghastly tract inviolate. In this place, at least the innocent spirit of 1987’s Children of the Forest — for this is their text.

Summary

Negatives, negatives, everywhere

Without wishing to be overly negative, this one truly comes from the "wow" file in indefensible drafting:

... other than a tax which would not be imposed but for...

Not only a triple negative, but since the squad’s definition of Tax already contains a negative (being any tax that isn’t a Stamp Tax) and “Indemnifiable Tax” is itself often used in the negative (e.g. “a tax which is not an Indemnifiable Tax”) — or even double negative (e.g. “other than a tax which is not an Indemnifiable Tax”) in the body of the ISDA Master Agreement. That makes it a sextuple negative. Beat that ISLA.

Now: as we know, HAL 9000 is coming to a legal workspace near you and will soon deliver us from these noisome legal curlicues. The JC fed this language into the “OpenAI” text generator, and asked for a summary that a second grader (in old money, an eight-year-old) could understand and, well, the outcome is impressive:

Indemnifiable Tax is a kind of tax that is different from other taxes. It is a tax that is only imposed when someone is connected to the country or state that imposes the tax. This connection could be because the person is from the country, does business there, or has gotten money from there.

Stamp Taxes are not Indemnifiable Taxes

Stamp Taxes are not Indemnifiable Taxes. They are covered by Section 4(e) and not the general gross-up in Section 2(d). They are not covered by Payee Tax Representations.

Comparisons

We are close to the turtles, here, ladies and gentlemen. The ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ definition of the “law” is as interesting for what it does not say as what it does, and all rounded out nicely by that sweetly ambivalent includes. Not means; just includes.

So — well, you know...

Summary

Now of all people you, would think a bunch of lawyers would know a law when they see one, but when it comes to the squad you can never be too careful. Nor should one arbitrarily restrict oneself to one’s field of competence — for who knows what sort of things could, under some conditions, from particular angles and in certain lights be for all intents and purposes laws even if, for other times and other peoples, they might not be? The answer is to set out the basic, sufficient conditions to count as a “law”, without ruling out other contrivances that one might also like to regard as laws, should the context recommend them. Here, using “includes” instead of “means” fits the bill admirably.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA law

Comparisons

The keen will have noticed that “Local Business Day” under an English law CSA is defined quite separately from “Local Business Day” as it is defined under the ISDA Master Agreement itself, whereas a Local Business Day under a New York law CSA, while separately defining the term, only goes on to defer to the original definition of LBD in the ISDA Master Agreement, pausing only to clarify that references to “payment” in the ISDA Master Agreement definiton are deemed to include Transfers under the CSA.

Why ISDA’s British crack drafting squad™ couldn’t have done this too, we can only wonder.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Local Business Day

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Local Delivery Day

Comparisons

If the ISDA Master Agreement ever becomes self-aware and then takes over skynet, this will be the clause that did it.

Summary

You know - this Master Agreement. right here.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Master Agreement

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Merger Without Assumption

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Merger Without Assumption

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Merger Without Assumption

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Multiple Transaction Payment Netting

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Multiple Transaction Payment Netting

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Multiple Transaction Payment Netting

Comparisons

A clause so joyously well-crafted in 1992, that ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ saw no need to change it a decade later, when the opportunity presented itself. They might have grasped it to devise a concept less clumsy than “the Non-affected Party or the Non-defaulting Party, as the case may be” — you know, like “Innocent Party”, or something like that — but perhaps that’s just me.

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Non-affected Party

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Non-affected Party

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Non-default Rate

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Non-default Rate

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Non-defaulting Party

Summary

To be compared with - well, Defaulting Party. Of all things. And Non-affected Party, as well. The difference between a Non-defaulting Party and a Non-affected Party, and the linguistic torture that distinction as inflicted on the race of ISDA lawyers ever since, says everything you need to know about the absurdity of modern commercial law.

• Do say: “the Non-defaulting Party or the non-Affected Party, as the case may be” over and over again.
• Don’t say: “Is there really no other way you could get across this concept, for crying out loud?”
  

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Non-defaulting Party

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Office

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Office

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Office

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Other Amounts

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Other Amounts

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Other Amounts

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Payee

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Payee

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Payee

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Payer

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Payer

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Payer

Comparisons

See especially how the inclusion of Potential Event of Default makes the much talked-about, seldom understood Section 2(a)(iii) condition to payments far more sensitive than it has any right to be.

Summary

A Potential Event of Default is a Failure to Pay or Deliver, Breach of Agreement (or other Event of Default) with an unexpired grace period, or where the grace period has expired but the Non-defaulting Party hasn’t (yet) given a notice of default actually accelerating the default into an actual Event of Default.

That means, 2(a)(iii) defenders, that any formal breach of the ISDA Master Agreement, if notified by the Non-defaulting Party, renders the Section 2(a)(iii) conditions precedent unfulfilled, and means you can suspend performance of your obligations under all outstanding Transactions. I don’t make the rules, folks.

Actually, courtesy of that parenthetical “, or both,” it is worse even than that, though we think common courtesy (or at any rate, sense} would intervene to prevent non-notified formal breaches being acted upon. But not the literal terms of the ISDA: A formal breach — any non-compliance with its terms more grievous than a failure to provide tax certificates (that is specifically carved out) on commission suspends the other Party’s obligations until cured.

This is truly a custom more honoured in the breach than th’observance, and just as well: if ISDAs locked up every time a party was late with its annual Sox attestation only half the world’s swap financing would ever get paid.

Grace periods and notice requirements for each Event of Default

A JC cut-out-and-keep™ guide. Useful if you are fretting about Potential Event of Default. Don’t feel embarrassed: we all do, every now and then, when spring is upon us.

• Failure to Pay or Deliver has both a short grace period and requires notice from the Non-defaulting Party before it becomes a full EOD;
• Breach of Agreement has an unusably, epochally long grace period — I mean thirty fricking days! — and requires notice from the Non-defaulting Party before it becomes a full EOD;
• Credit Support Default has no grace period or notice requirement, but there’s a good argument that any grace periods and notice requirements under the Credit Support Document in question would get pulled in by reference, so they are there in effect;
• Misrepresentation has neither a grace period or a notice requirement. The theory being a representation — any representation other than a tax one — being a statement inducing one to enter into the contract in the first place —is of such fundamental moment that its untruth justifies summary execution. Careful here, though, misrepresentations are a bit of a minefield to step through. See especially section 3(d).
• DUST references notice requirements and grace periods under the Specified Transaction (where there is has been a default) but not where it is a repudiation, but that kind of figures.
• Cross Default, that most absurd of all Events of Default, has no notice requirement, no grace period, and doesn't even require the lender of the Specified Indebtedness to have exercised a termination right — though any grace period under the Specified Indebtedness still applies.
• Bankruptcy has no notice requirement or grace period (indeed, on Automatic Termination Event applies it may happens even without the Non-defaulting Party’s knowledge), though there are some grace periods under the various tedious limbs of Bankruptcy definition, and these vary by edition of the ISDA Master Agreement;
• Merger Without Assumption has neither notice requirement or grace period — again not unreasonable, since a merger without assumption is tantamount to a repudiation of contract, and if you’re no longer playing the game, I don’t see why I should.
  

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Proceedings

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Proceedings

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Proceedings

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Process Agent

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Process Agent

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Process Agent

Comparisons

Rate of exchange — for reasons known only to ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ not capitalised — features only in Section 6(f), sealing with set-off, and Section 8(b), dealing with Contractual Currency. Exchange rate: the rate at which you exchange things. Maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to capitalise it because it is so obvious.

Summary

You could scarcely ask for a less necessary definition. In their hearts, you sense ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ knew this, for they couldn’t find it in themselves to even capitalise it. In the 1992 ISDA, rate of exchange didn’t even make the Definitions section, but was half-heartedly tacked onto the end of a clause halfway through the Contractual Currency section. It made it into the 2002 ISDA’s Definitions Section only because it somehow wangled its unecessary way into the new Set-off clause (Section 6(f) of the 2002 ISDA).

But if two guiding principles of defining terms are (i) don’t, for terms you only use once or twice, and (ii) don’t, if the meaning of the thing you are considering defining is patently obvious — then “rate of exchange” comprehensively fails the main criteria of a good definition.

The JC’s general view is, all other things being equal, to ease comprehension, eschew definitions.

Also, could they not have used “exchange rate”, instead of rate of exchange?

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA rate of exchange

Comparisons

Relevant Jurisdiction carries the same non-meaning in the 2002 ISDA as it did in the 1992 ISDA. Which is nice.

Summary

Relevant Jurisdiction is a special artefact in the ISDA canon because, insofar as the ISDA Master Agreement proper is concerned, it is the only piece of text that falls definitively below the Biggs threshold. It isn’t used in the ISDA Master Agreement itself at all.

HOLD YOUR LETTERS, PEDANTS. Yes, it is true, it does feature in the printed form in the Part 2 Payer Representations. But these are, by their terms, voluntary, optional and malleable commercial terms, that the parties may strike out or adjust, leaving the Relevant Jurisdiction dangling there behind the ISDA’s woolly posterior, like a dag that may not be shorn. The irony! Relevant to what?! Nothing!

You might ask why this definition — which is tedious, sure, but hardly a backbreaker — couldn’t have been wrapped into the text of the actual representation in Part 2

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Relevant Jurisdiction

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Schedule

Summary

The Schedule is where the parties make their elections, customised representations, and any other amendments to the form of the ISDA that they want to apply across the board. Thus the Schedule is the heart of the ISDA negotiation. It is famously divided into five parts, of which you will spend most of your time in Parts 1 and 5.

Part 1 - Termination Provisions
Part 2 - Tax Representations (Schedule)
Part 3 - Agreement to Deliver Documents
Part 4 - Miscellaneous (Schedule)
Part 5 - Other Provisions

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Schedule

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Scheduled Settlement Date

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Scheduled Settlement Date

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Scheduled Settlement Date

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Set-off

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Set-off

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Set-off

Comparisons

They got their over-engineering right in the first go round, and the “Specified Entity” concept is largely the same in the 2002 ISDA as it was in the 1992 ISDA. The Absence of Litigation clause got a makever on 2002 to include Specified Entities, too — in 1992 it only mentioned Affiliates. Good, huh?

Fun fact: in the 1992ma, it says “Specified Entity has the meanings” — plural — “specified in the Schedule.” By 2002, ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ had come back to its senses. JC mentions this only to demonstrate his own unfathomable attention to detail, and to point up a want of fastidiousness on the part of the fastidiousest cabal known to law.

Summary

A Specified Entity is any affiliate of a counterparty to an ISDA Master Agreement which is designated in the relevant Schedule.

It is relevant to the definition of Cross Default and Default under Specified Transaction in that it widens the effect of those provisions to include defaults by the parties specified.

It is so (~ cough ~) important that it is, literally, the first thing you see when you regard an ISDA Schedule.

The same concept in both versions of the ISDA Master Agreement only with different clause numberings. Specified Entity is relevant to:

• DUST
• Cross Default
• Bankruptcy
• Credit Event Upon Merger

And of course the Absence of Litigation representation. Let’s not forget that.

Each party designates its Specified Entities for each of these events in Part 1(a) of the Schedule, which gives the Schedule its familiar layout:

(a) “Specified Entity” means in relation to Party A for the purpose of:― Section 5(a)(v), [SPECIFY]. Section 5(a)(vi), [SPECIFY]. Section 5(a)(vii), [SPECIFY]. Section 5(b)(v), [SPECIFY]. and in relation to Party B for the purpose of:― Section 5(a)(v), [SPECIFY]. Section 5(a)(vi), [SPECIFY]. Section 5(a)(vii), [SPECIFY]. Section 5(b)(v), [SPECIFY].

Now, why would anyone want different Affiliates to trigger this a Event of Default depending precisely upon how they cork-screwed into the side of a hill? Well, there is one reason where it might make a big difference when it comes to Bankruptcy, and we will pick that up in the premium section. But generally — and even in that case, really — in our time of variation margin it really ought not to be the thing that is bringing down your ISDA Master Agreement.

Note it also pops up as relevant in the “Absence of Litigation” representation in Section 3(c) of the 2002 ISDA.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Specified Entity

Comparisons

No change to this definition between the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA. This clause is only really relatable in the context of Cross Default Event of Default, of which it is a component.

Summary

See the Cross Default page which discusses Specified Indebtedness in detail — gory detail, if you are a premium subscriber — in the only context in which it appears: as the type of contract to which a Cross Default applies.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Specified Indebtedness

Comparisons

A Specified Transaction under the 1992 ISDA is, by the standards of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™, monosyllabic to the point of being terse. But that is as nothing compared to the 1987 ISDA, which wasn’t even called a Specified Transaction, but was just a Specified Swap.

Under the 2002 ISDA, it is expressed with far more of the squad’s signature sense of derring-do and the Byzantine, expanding the basic definition:

• Specifically to include things we have thunk of since 1992, such as futures, credit derivatives, repo, stock lending, weather derivatives, NDFs, transactions executed under terms of business; and
• Generally to include similar transactions that are presently or in future become common in the financial markets — a neat a catch-all, designed to include any future pieces of financial wizardry (and/or mass destruction) that have not been thunk of just yet.
  

Summary

Used in the Default under Specified Transaction Event of Default under Section 5(a)(v) — fondly known to those in the know as “DUST”.

What?

Specified Transactions are those financial markets transactions between you and your counterparty other than those under the present ISDA Master Agreement, default under which justifies the wronged party closing out the present ISDA. “Specified Transactions” therefore specifically exclude Transactions under the ISDA itself for the sensible reason that a default under those is covered by by Failure to Pay or Deliver and Breach of Obligation. It might lead to a perverse result if misadventure under an ISDA Master Agreement Transaction which did not otherwise amount to an Event of Default, became one purely as a result of the DUST provision, however unlikely that may be.

Credit support annexes?

We are going to go out on a limb here and say that little parenthetical “(including an agreement with respect to any such transaction)” is, if not deliberately designed that way, is at least calculated to capture failures under a credit support annex which, yes, is a Transaction under an ISDA Master Agreement but no, is not really a swap or anything really like one.

There is enough chat about Credit Support Providers (yes, yes, the counterparty itself is of course not a Credit Support Provider) to make us think, on a fair, large and liberal interpretation, that a default under the CSA to a swap Transaction is meant to be covered.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Specified Transaction

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Stamp Tax

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Stamp Tax

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Stamp Tax

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Stamp Tax Jurisdiction

Summary

Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Stamp Tax Jurisdiction

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Stamp Tax Jurisdiction

Comparisons

Redlines

• 1987 ⇒ 1992: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1992 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’02 vs. the ’92: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1987 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)

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Discussion

You will find the redlines above most disappointing — or delightful, depending on whether you like order or chaos — as this language has not changed at all since 1987. “{{Template:2002prov|Tax}}” features in the ISDA Master Agreement as follows:

• Section {{Template:2002prov|4(a)}}: To furnish specified information, including as regards (at {{Template:2002prov|4(a)(iii)}}) any forms required to pay {{Template:2002prov|Tax}} without withholding, leading on to...
• Section {{Template:2002prov|2(d)}}: All payments are made without withholding or deduction unless required by law, and (where withholding IS required by law and the {{Template:2002prov|Tax}} is an {{Template:2002prov|Indemnifiable Tax}}) a gross-up is required.
• Section {{Template:2002prov|4(e)}}: Each party pays its own {{Template:2002prov|Stamp Tax}} on execution of the {{Template:2002prov|Agreement}} (and indemnifies the other party if its taxing jurisdiction imposes about a stampable amount on the other party)

Summary

{{{{{1}}}|Tax}} and {{{{{1}}} |Stamp Tax}} are meant to be mutually exclusive and both refer to duties levied on payments under the swap {{{{{1}}} |Transaction}} itself and not under hedges to it, so be careful when using them (especially in the context of delta-one synthetic equity swaps where the main stamp duty and capital gains issues accrue on Hedge Positions. For those you might want to introduce a conceopt like Local Taxes, or something similar.

Here’s what the ISDA Users’ guide has to say about {{{{{1}}} |Tax}} and {{{{{1}}} |Stamp Tax}}, in a footnote on page 58.

“{{{{{1}}} |Tax}}” is defined in Section {{{{{1}}} |14}} as any tax, charge or other similar listed items, except a stamp, registration, documentation or similar tax (i.e., a “{{{{{1}}} |Stamp Tax}}” as defined in Section {{{{{1}}} |14}} of the 2002 Agreement).

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Tax

Comparisons

Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

The 1992 ISDA represented a significant change from the 1987 ISDA which was a bit half-hearted about gross-ups.

Other than the renumbering, no real changes in the definition of Tax Event from the 1992 ISDA to the 2002 ISDA though, unhelpfully, the sub-paragraph references in the 1992 ISDA are (1) and (2) and in the 2002 ISDA are (A) and (B). Otherwise, pretty much the same.

Summary

Basically, the gist is this: if the rules change after the Trade Date such that you have to gross up an Indemnifiable Tax would weren’t expecting to when you priced the trade, you have a right to get out of the trade, rather than having to ship the gross up for the remainder of the Transaction.

That said, this paragraph is a bastard to understand. Have a gander at the JC’s nutshell version (premium only, sorry) and you’ll see it is not such a bastard after all, then.

In the context of cleared swaps, you typically add a third limb, which is along the lines of:

(3) required to make a deduction from a payment under an Associated LCH Transaction where no corresponding gross up amount is required under the corresponding Transaction Payment under this Agreement.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Tax Event

Comparisons

Numbering Discrepancy: Note the numbering discrepancy in Section 5(b) between the 1992 ISDA and 2002 ISDA. This is caused by a new 5(b)(ii) (Force Majeure Event) in the 2002 ISDA before Tax Event, which is thus shunted from Section 5(b)(ii) (in the 1992 ISDA) to Section 5(b)(iii) (in the 2002 ISDA).

Redlines

• 1987 ⇒ 1992: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1992 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’02 vs. the ’92: comparison (and in reverse)
• 1987 ⇒ 2002: Redline of the ’92 vs. the ’87: comparison (and in reverse)

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Discussion

Tax Event Upon Merger: Note the missing “indemnifiable” from the fifth line of the 2002 ISDA version and the expanded description of “merger events” towards the end of the clause. And the renumbering as a result of the Force Majeure Event clause in the 2002 ISDA.

Summary

This is you can imagine, a red letter day for ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ who quite outdid itself in the complicated permutations for how to terminate an ISDA Master Agreement should there be a Tax Event or a Tax Event Upon Merger. Things kick off in Section 6(b)(ii) and it really just gets better from there.

So, Tax Event Upon Merger considers the scenario where the coming together of two entites — we assume they hail from different jurisdictions or at least have different practical tax residences — has an unfortunate effect on the tax status of payments due by the merged entity under an existing Transaction.

It introduces a new and unique concept — the “Burdened Party”, being the one who gets slugged with the tax — and who may or may not be the “Affected Party” — in this case the one subject to the merger.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Tax Event Upon Merger

Proposed ISDA amendments as a result of adjustment to Section 2(a)(iii)

The 2(a)(iii) amendment juggernaut seems to have lost its heat but there was a time when ISDA was proposing the following:

"Terminated Transactions” means, with respect to any Early Termination Date, (a) if resulting from an Illegality or a Force Majeure Event, all Affected Transactions specified in the notice given pursuant to Section 6(b)(iv), (b) if resulting from any other Termination Event, all Affected Transactions and (c) if resulting from an Event of Default, all Transactions, in each case under which a party has or may have any obligation, including, without limitation, an obligation to pay an amount that became payable (or would have become payable but for Section 2(a)(iii) or due but for Section 5(d)) to the other party under Section 2(a)(i) or 2(d)(i)(4) on or prior to that Early Termination Date and which remains unpaid as at such Early Termination Date.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Termination Currency

Comparisons

But for the edition-appropriate references to “Loss and Market Quotation (as the case may be)” for the 1992 ISDA, and Close-out Amount (for the 2002 ISDA, these definitions are identical.

Summary

A fabulous example of the English language getting the better of a committee of its own seasoned professional users, ISDA’s remarkable “Termination Currency Equivalent” definition erodes the fabric in which the basic assumptions of people who share a common language are woven.

It convolutes, to the point of incomprehensibility, an idea well enough described by its own name. Who would labour under a serious doubt about this expression:

“one party must pay the other the amount in its termination currency equivalent”?

Failing that, how about this:

“one party must pay the other an equivalent amount in the termination currency”?

The idea of an amount in one currency of an amount expressed in another really oughtn’t to be that hard to master, but to see how hard someone with profound ontological uncertainty can make it, have a gander at this ==>

General discussion

Here’s what the Encyclopaedia Galactica has to say about Termination Currency Equivalent:

Under the 2002 ISDA, a payment on early termination will be made in the Termination Currency. The “Termination Currency” must be specified in Part 1(f) of the Schedule to the 2002 ISDA and, if not specified or the currency specified is not freely available, the fallback will be U.S. dollar for a 2002 Agreement governed by New York law, and the euro if a 2002 ISDA is governed by English law. The 1992 Agreement had a U.S. dollar fallback regardless of the governing law of the 1992 ISDA. In calculating amounts payable, any Close-out Amount or Unpaid Amount is converted to a “Termination Currency Equivalent” on the basis of an exchange rate determined in accordance with the 2002 ISDA by a foreign exchange agent.

Comparisons

Just one of the four different defined terms relating to interest rate determinations in the ISDA Master Agreement. The weren’t going to leave anything to chance, those ninjas.

Summary

Ballast, in a word: Termination Rate is an expression which features but once in the ISDA Master Agreement — it is the fallback interest rate to apply to Early Termination Amounts, when all other methods haven’t worked, to accrue interest between determination and payment — and which, as you’ll see, amounts to the party’s own cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die-but-I’m-still-not-going-to-justify-it cost of borrowing in the market.

Which scarcely would deserve a definition even if it was used repeatedly through the whole agreement.

In any case, since on your own theory of the game, your counterparty is almost certainly a dead parrot at this point, spending too much time agonising about how much interest you can claim from it on a Close-out Amount you are not going to get paid in any case is hardly one of the better uses of its — or your, for that matter — remaining time on this mortal coil.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Termination Rate

Comparisons

Not to be confused with Threshold in the 1995 CSA and all its varieties — being the amount of gross Exposure beyond which one must start posting variation margin — the Threshold Amount is a level relevant to the calculation of the Cross Default Event of Default - it is the aggregate principle amount of Specified Indebtedness one must have defaulted on to permit one’s counterparty to close you out.

Summary

Threshold Amount

The Threshold Amount is a key feature of the Cross Default Event of Default in the ISDA Master Agreement. It is the level over which accumulated indebtedness defaults comprise an Event of Default. It is usually defined as a cash amount or a percentage of shareholder funds, or both, in which case — schoolboy error hazard alert — be careful to say whether it is the greater or lesser of the two.

Because of the snowball effect that a cross default clause can have on a party’s insolvency it should be big: like, life-threateningly big — because the consequences of triggering a Cross Default are dire, and it may create its own chain reaction beyond the ISDA itself. So expect to see, against a swap dealer, 2-3% of shareholder funds, or sums in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. For end users the number may well be a lot lower (especially for thinly capitalised investment vehicles like funds — like, ten million dollars or so — and, of course, will key off NAV, not shareholder funds.

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Threshold Amount

Comparisons

Template:M comp disc 2002 ISDA Transaction

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Transaction

Summary

If you think of an ISDA Transaction as comprising offsetting payment streams, these payments fall into one of three ontological categories:

• Been and gone: Those that are already paid: settled, gone, checked into the hereafter; on permanent location in that foreign country we call the past — we care less about these; they are but a fossil record: they pose no risk, attract no capital and excite no prospects of revenue or compensation.
• Yet to come: Due to be paid, or delivered, at a specified date in the future. Perhaps fixed; perhaps yet to be determined, but conceptually still out there. It is, conventionally, by off setting the provisional present value of these future cashflows, that we value “the Transaction” — this is what we call its “replacement cost”.
• The twilight zone: That weird inter-regnum of payments whose due date has passed, and which should have have been paid, and thus emigrated permanently to that foreign country but, for whatever reason — inattention, inability, defiance, or the affordances of Section 2(a)(iii) — they have not yet been made, so they need to be worried about, accounted for and factored into things, over and above the “replacement” value of the trade.
  

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Unpaid Amounts

General discussion

Template:M gen 2002 ISDA Waiting Period