Template:M summ GMSLA 10

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No Event of Default without notice

Note that (unlike the ISDA Master Agreement an event only becomes an Event of Default once the Non Defaulting Party has given the Defaulting Party notice of it.

The dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime

More interesting than the Events of Default that are there are the ones that are not: There is no:

Why not?: Unlike an ISDA Master Agreement, generally, securities financing transactions are generally short-dated (if repos) or callable on notice (if stock loans) and (unlike an ISDA, where margin is a function of an independent credit support arrangement which may or may not be there) daily margin is a structure feature of the transaction. If your counterparty suffers any kind of credit deterioration, your margin (or its failure to pay it) should cover you, and if it doesn’t, you can immediately — or at least quickly — get out of your exposure. If they unwind okay—great. If they don’t, you have them bang to rights on a Failure to Pay. Simples.

Your more perfidious counterparties might want to start crow-barring these events in — at least, ones like Illegality — especially if you, like many brokers, are in the habit of doing trades on term. An Illegality event ought not poop the nest, but a credit deterioration-related default events like DUST or Cross Default may, seeing as the very point of the term trade is to prove to your accountants you have stable financing of your margin loan operations.

Failures to deliver are not Events of Default

Failures to deliver Securities under a 2010 GMSLA are not Events of Default because failure to deliver securities to initiate a Loan is not a breach of agreement, and if a Borrower fails to redeliver Equivalent Securities at the end of a Loan, the Lender may buy in Securities to cover the fail, and may execute a mini close-out, but that is not an Event of Default either.

But a failure to deliver Collateral at inception or to redeliver Equivalent Collateral on termination is an Event of Default.

Deliveries frequently fail in the stock lending market for many reasons:

  • Operational failures, such as a mismatch of instructions;
  • A Lender may lose its expected supply (for example a rehypothecating prime broker intending to rehypothecate client’s securities where the client recalls and sells the securities sells before the Loan settles)
  • A market counterparty may fail against the party expecting to deliver under the Loan
  • Market events may cause a lack of liquidity — for example if the shares go “special”

Making delivery failures an Event of Default would put participants in a perpetual state of default even though there were no credit concerns for the "failing” counterparty. Events of Default are really only meant to address counterparty insolvency risk: The innocent party can immediately terminate all outstanding transactions upon an Event of Default and so end its exposure.

Where the creditworthiness of a counterparty is not in question the innocent party can rely on normal contractual remedies for breach of contract.

Allowing a party to declare an Event of Default allows extraordinary leverage for what is often a technical or minor breach.

Compare that with Collateral delivery failures. The Borrower can choose what it delivers as Collateral. If, having done so, the party still fails to deliver, the recipient has grounds for a credit concern.

What is the protection for delivery failures then?

Deliveries in stock lending are usually free of payment: cash collateral moves after the shares settle. This is for 3 reasons:

  1. The cash collateral is not usually in the same currency as shares, meaning that a delivery versus payment is not practical anyway.
  2. Requiring DVP would increase an already high failure rate.
  3. Because of the high failure rate, the cash would frequently be transferred against failed settlements, presenting an inverted credit risk.

In practice, each day participants determine the securities and collateral that are currently held by each party, calculate their values as at market close, and make a collateral calls for any shortfall. A Borrower expecting to be delivered securities would wait for them to settle before paying away cash against a margin call by the Lender. If they were not delivered, the margin call against the Borrower would be reduced.

All other things being equal:

  • If a Lender failed to settle at inception there would be no loan and neither party would have any exposure.
  • If a Borrower failed to settle at redemption, the Lender would not return Collateral, and (but for intraday market moves) each party would have the same exposure it had previously.
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