Default Interest; Other Amounts - 1992 ISDA Provision
1992 ISDA Master Agreement
A Jolly Contrarian owner’s manual™ Go premium
Crosscheck: 2(e) in a Nutshell™
Original text
See ISDA Comparison for a comparison between the 1992 ISDA and the 2002 ISDA.
Resources and Navigation
|
Comparisons
Section 2(e), dealing with default interest, was removed in the 2002 ISDA, and replaced with a spikier, more fulsome Section 9(h) (Interest and Compensation).
A new and different Section 2(e) for the 2002 ISDA was almost revived after the global financial crisis as a tool for imposing a “use it or lose it” trigger on Section 2(a)(iii), but the moment passed. See Condition End Date for more information.
Basics
Section 2(e) covers that netherworld between when a party defaults on its obligations under a Transaction and when (and if)the other, innocent, party closes that Transaction out.
Now, you might think this would of necessity be a short period — if the other guy is in default I am hardly going to sit around and do nothing, am I? — but a swap transaction isn’t like a normal lending transaction, the innocent party might be significantly out of the money on the Transaction, and therefore quite happy to to do nothing, particularly since, as long as the default is continuing, Section 2(a)(iii) suspends that party’s own payment and delivery obligations under the Transaction indefinitely.
Note the difference between a defaulted payment obligation and a defaulted delivery obligation: payments have a fairly anal penalty interest accrual regime; deliveries are left up to the parties to agree for themselves in the Schedule. This, in the JC’s unsolicited opinion, is a bit wet on ISDA’s part: a delivery obligation (usually of a tradable security or commodity) clearly has an observable market value as of its due delivery date. It is hard to see why interest could not accrue on that notional value. But anyway.
Premium content
Here the free bit runs out. Subscribers click 👉 here. New readers sign up 👉 here and, for ½ a weekly 🍺 go full ninja about all these juicy topics👇
|
See also
- Section 2(a)(iii); the ISDA Master Agreement’s famous “flawed asset” provision.
- Section 9(h) in the 2002 ISDA