Hedging exemption
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The Law and Lore of Repackaging
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EMIR regulates the infrastructure of European financial markets, and one of its main jobs is to mandate the exchange of variation and initial margin for uncleared derivatives — a sort of cack-handed behavioural psychology play to nudge OTC derivatives trading onto exchange. Hasn’t worked. Anyway, we digress.
Posting cash to a counterparty for mark-to-market moves is a painful, and in some respects, stupid thing to do, and market participants are not well set up to do it, others for which the scale of their trading means it is not worth the bother — and many for which both is true. These are the so-called “non-financial counterparties” — businesses not designed primarily for the financial services industry, and whose incidental activity in OTC derivatives markets does falls below specified thresholds.
Non-financial firms whose derivative activity falls below those thresholds are labelled “NFC-” and are out of scope for EMIR regulatory margin.
EMIR “Hedging exemption”
The question may arise as to whether an SPV is a non-financial counterparty and, if it is, whether article 10.3 of EMIR means you don’t have to engage in all that tedious measuring of notionals to ensure you stay small enough to count as an NFC-. Here’s what the hedging exemption says:
3. In calculating the positions referred to in paragraph 1, the non-financial counterparty shall include all the OTC derivative contracts entered into by the non-financial counterparty or by other non-financial entities within the group to which the non-financial counterparty belongs, which are not objectively measurable as reducing risks directly relating to the commercial activity or treasury financing activity of the non-financial counterparty or of that group.
Repackaging SPVs
Now this seems squarely to capture the derivative activity of a limited recourse repackaging SPV, which is entering derivatives to pass the cashflow of an asset, and receiving a cashflow to pay down a note. Even if you muff up the structuring, the “limited recourse” nature of an SPV forces a careful observer to the conclusion that an SPV who transacts derivatives in this way is “objectively measurably reducing risks directly relating it its commercial activity” — it is eliminating them in point of fact — and given the underlying security structure of such a deal (where the SPV secures its rights to the asset whose cashflow it is manufacturing in favour of the dealer to whom it is manufacturing that income stream) requiring the SPV to also post collateral as a credit mitigant makes no sense at all. There is no credit risk. The asset is the perfect delta-one hedge.
Nevertheless, this must have seemed too easy for some of the more curmudgeonly compliance professionals on the continent, and at the time of the EMIR refit the question arose as to whether this would cover SPVs (such as repackaging vehicles whose principal activity is to deal in financial instruments). The ESMA Q&A[1] posed, on page 28, this question:
Can non-financial counterparties (NFCs) whose core activity is to buy, sell or own financial instruments, benefit from the hedging exemption when using OTC derivative contracts to hedge certain risks, for example risks arising from the potential indirect impact on the value of assets the NFC buys, sells or owns resulting from the fluctuations of interest rates, inflation rates, foreign exchange rates or credit risk?
And came forth the answer, on page 30:
Yes. The hedging exemption set out in Article 10(3) EMIR applies to all non-financial counterparties, irrespective of what their core activity is. The list of financial counterparties in Article 2(8) EMIR is a closed list. It does not allow for the treatment of non-financial counterparties as financial counterparties for certain EMIR provisions, such as Article 10(3). That provision itself does not distinguish which non-financial counterparty is allowed to use the hedging exemption depending on that counterparty’s specific activity.
AIFs
Though, trick for the young players — an AIF is a form of financial counterparty, so does not qualify for the hedging exemption.