Simple answer emerged today – it isn’t.
According to Anglo’s unaudited financial report for 2010 released this afternoon that bank accounts for only €28.1bn worth of Emergency Liquidity assistance:
At 31 December 2010 euro denominated borrowings from central banks totalled €45.0bn, and include €28.1bn borrowed under special liquidity facilities.
Now, this is not good news for the other banks at all.
I had always worked under the assumption that the vast majority of CB ELA was to support Anglo as it goes through it death throes.
But today’s numbers from Anglo mean that of the total of approximately €49.5bn* of ELA being provided by the central bank, €21.5bn is going to banks other than Anglo.
EBS and INBS are too small to account for that, which seems to mean that either one or both of BOI and AIB have their fingers in the CB pot to a much greater extend than I previously thought.
BOI are in bullish form so it might serve them (and AIB) well to clarify their position with CBI ELA.
* The Irish Central Bank report ELA in the ‘other assets’ column of their financial statement. While this column contains entries other than ELA, these entries historically are in the €1bn to €2bn range, so I have subtracted €1,5bn from the currently outstanding €51bn in that column.
€51bn of “Other assets” doesn’t mean €51bn of ELA
Hi jck,
Yes, I have mentioned before that not all of the ‘other assets’ is ELA, but the vast majority of it is. From talking to the Central Bank and looking back through years of reports it seems the residue (ie not ELA) of other assets is between €1bn-€2bn. I have inserted a paragraph to clarify, but I don’t think it the numbers are large enough to make a great difference.
Thx. Makes no difference indeed, thought number of non-ELA was much higher.
Now I still would love to know why ELA is in “Other assets” and not where the ECB rules say it should be: “Other claims on euro area…” I guess to confuse the punters.
@ El Lorco
we had heard anecdotally around the turn of the year that the ELA usage above the promissory note level was heavily related to UK/Sterling denominated loan books of AIB/BOI/IPTSB falling out of the ECB collateral framework agreement (as scheduled). This should be ‘rectified’ by the 16.5bn in ELG issuance at the end of January which has been self-held and now assumably repo-ed at the ECB.