Template:Isda Cross acceleration summ

“Cross acceleration” is not an actual ISDA Event of Default, but it is what happens to an actual ISDA Event of Default — namely, the much-negotiated, seldom-used Section 5(a)(vi), Cross Default, if you can persuade your credit department to water it down to something sensible.

How to change Cross Default to cross acceleration

You can amend Cross Default to Cross Acceleration by adding the language in the panel: Seems so easy, doesn’t it?

Cross Default is triggered by two kinds of default:

1. General default: a general event of default of any kind at any time during the tenor of any Specified Indebtedness — this could be anything: the borrower’s bankruptcy, a breach of its reps and warranties, a non-payment of interest, any repudiatory breach of the contract of indebtedness, really; or
2. Repayment default: a borrower’s failure to fulfil, in full, final repayment of the debt itself when due.

Why distinguish between them, seeing as both are cataclysmic?

There is an answer, but it is fussy, word-smithy stuff: because a general default entitles the lender to accelerate the debt requiring the borrower to repay it at once, before its scheduled maturity date; a repayment default, logically, falls on that scheduled maturity date, and so can’t be “accelerated” as such. There is nothing to “accelerate”: our destination, the repayment date, is already here.

Therefore to convert a cross default to a cross acceleration, you only need to require general defaults to have been accelerated. Repayment defaults can’t be accelerated.

Cross acceleration also avoids the need to muck around waiting for grace periods to expire, granting indulgences for administrative and operational error and all that dreck: if the counterparty has actually accelerated the loan, the grace periods and operational errors no longer matter. It is too late. The game is up.

Now, to be sure, legal eagles might start hopping up and down, flapping their wings and squawking restively at this point.

“But,” they will say, “what about grace periods and operational errors on that final payment? We must be allowed those before you can close out!”

The short answer is that ordinary grace periods are factored in — the event isn’t triggered until they have all expired. As for affordances that don’t quite count as grace periods (for example, concessions allowing a borrower to provide evidence of operational error, giving it some more time to pay) — well, on a fair, large and liberal view these count as grace periods anyway.

Is “downgrading” to cross acceleration wise?

There are two schools of thought:
Yes: The sensible, pragmatic, wise, noble, fearless and brave one you will find in these pages: “Yes. Cross default is misplaced in a modern daily-collateralised ISDA. Anything you can do either to restrict its scope, or simply to avoid being dragged into a tedious argument about its scope, is worth doing.”
No: The learned one, from the learned author of that terrible FT book about derivatives: “All other things being equal, no. One should only soften cross default reluctantly. Because other counterparts might not be so weak.”

A brief critique of the FT Book about derivatives

This, in our view, rather mischaracterises what is going on.

“With cross acceleration the innocent third party actually has to start proceedings against the defaulting counterparty before you can trigger your transaction termination rights ...”

But it doesn’t have to sue your counterparty; just call its debt in.

“The downgrading [of cross-default to cross acceleration] therefore affects the timing of your right to terminate, It is no longer automatic but deferred.”

We don’t know what the learned author means by “automatic”: either way, the termination right is optional, not automatic, but in either case, it is contingent on a different independent event: in one case, the more nebulous “default”; in the other, a lender’s quite hard-edged acceleration following the default.

“If the third party is your counterparty’s main relationship bank it may take some time to review its position...”

Indeed it may, and probably will. But while it is doing that it is not accelerating its claim against your counterparty. It is granting its customer, and your counterparty, an indulgence. Your position is, therefore, not worsened in the meantime.

“... and may propose a compromise which does not suit you.”

You, bear in mind, are the owner of a fully collateralised ISDA Master Agreement which the counterparty has, in the meantime, continued faithfully to perform. If one of your co-creditors has granted an indulgence on outstanding indebtedness — even in return for some other surety or compromise — which avoid that debt being accelerated in full, how can that by itself make your position worse?

“I believe such downgrade requests should only be considered favourably if specific foreseeable circumstances justify them [...] or if your counterparty gives written confirmation that cross acceleration applies to all its agreements and will do so in the future. This is because if even one counterparty has Cross Default it would be in pole position to trigger its termination rights.”

On this last point, the learned author is, technically, correct: you are marginally worse off if you have conceded cross acceleration and other swap counterparties have not. They can beat you, and your counterparty’s main relationship bank, to the punch, assuming they are cowboys who view a relationship contract like an ISDA Master Agreement as something that it should be a race to close out. Brokers that the JC knows don’t tend to think that way. They have compliance officers who will quail at the thought of not treating their customers fairly. In any case, the fact that this could happen just illustrates how stupid the concept of cross-default is. Especially in our enlightened age of zero-threshold, daily margined non-exotic swap contracts. Especially given the extreme conceptual difficulty of even gathering enough information to work out whether you even can exercise your stupid cross default right.

Just how a third party would ever be able to assess the value of defaulted Specified Indebtedness has never been explained to this old goat.

So this is angel-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff indeed.