Template:M summ GMRA 4

From The Jolly Contrarian
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This provision says far less of any moment than its heft would suggest it does. In a nutshell:

  • You can call for Margin if you have a Net Exposure, meaning the the amount the other party owes you — accounting for unpaid income and posted margin — is more than you owe it.
  • As long as you meet eligibility criteria, it is up to the person having to post margin to decide what to post except that the requester can ask for any outstanding margin it has posted back. This scenario should only happen where the Net Exposure inverts between margin calls. But anyway: if you’ve posted away, you can ask for it back. Otherwise, the other guy decides.
  • Where you post cash, you do so in the Base Currency and — stating the bleeding obvious here, as any fule kno[1] — the transfer of cash creates indebtedness.
  • In lieu of Margin Transfers, the parties can agree to “reprice” a Transaction — effectively restriking and settling it to market and creating a new Transaction in the same Purchased Securities at the prevailing rate — or to “adjust” it, in which case you can change up the Purchased Securities to something else altogether.

There follow some laborious provisions explaining exactly how this happens, but they do no more than tediously — and, in all likelihood, wrongly — codify the real-world common sense your operations team will undoubtedly bring to the task of figuring it out; a feat you can bet the house on that they won’t achieve by reading the nether regions of paragraph 4 of the Global Master Repurchase Agreement.

  1. At least, any fule who has read the JC’s impassioned rants on the subject of cash elsewhere. Right, readers?