Definitions and Inconsistency - IM CSD Provision
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2018 ISDA Credit Support Deed (IM) (English law)
Paragraph 1(a) in a Nutshell™ Use at your own risk, campers!
Full text of Paragraph 1(a)
Related agreements and comparisons
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Content and comparisons
If sparse, staccato-style drafting is your kind of thing — it is mine — it is never an encouraging sign when the first words in an agreement are “Unless otherwise defined in this Deed”.
Here, we think, this leaden proviso is to account for the tedious fact that a credit support deed is not a mere appendage to the ISDA Master Agreement, but its own independent legal construct, able to stand on its own two feet and makes its own way in the world, not tied to the apron strings of mother ISDA, whereas a credit support annex is forever a part of the ISDA Master Agreement with no ontological existence beyond its loving arms. So, that “defined terms in the ISDA apply here” follows as a matter of logic for an annex, but not a self-supporting, suffrage-enjoying, deed of the realm, even if it does — or should — still go without saying. It is said; so be it. Nobody — but a part inside every prose stylist — died.
In the 2018, there is a pitifully specific articulation of something else that should, but alas does not, go without saying, but it manages to refrain from explaining what it means by “transfer” — a pledge, of course, not really being a transfer.
Summary
I don’t know about you, but to me, this has the hallmarks of a group of legal ninjas who are procrastinating before getting on with a job they really don’t want to have to do.
You can almost see ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ rearranging the photos of the mother-in-law on the mantelpiece, dusting the lavatory cistern and organising the spice rack in the pantry, all the while knowing that eventually, inevitably — tomorrow, maybe, just as soon as someone has swept out the garden shed and polished the cutlery — they will have to get on with the tedious business of writing a special credit support document for regulatory margin.
There is real pathos here, though it elides gradually into bathos by the time we’re contemplating inconsistency fallbacks between inconsistency fallbacks. Beware, a rent in the space-tedium continuum that way lies.