Specified Transaction - ISDA Provision
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2002 ISDA Master Agreement A Jolly Contrarian owner’s manual™
Specified Transaction in all its glory
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Overview
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,[1] 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[2] 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.
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- The JC’s famous Nutshell™ summary of this clause
- Fiddler ahoy! Great opportunities for members of the credit department to “add value”
- The odd cognitive dissonance between DUST and Cross Default