Greece Returns To The Bond Market With A Present To Its Last Group Of Bond Buyers

On the same day that Greek PM Alexis Tsipras triumphantly announced to The Guardian that “The worst is clearly behind us“, Greece just as triumphantly announced that its long-rumored bond issue, the first after a three year hiatus which saw its last bond issue crash then surge, is now a reality. Just like in 2014, Greece is looking to sell another batch of five-year bonds, according to an Athens Stock Exchange filing. The bonds will be sold in benchmark size via a legion of banks, and are expected to price on Tuesday. In terms of total size, it will ultimately depend on client demand – recall that the the 2014 issue was 8x oversubscribed – with UBS expecting a possible size of €2BN-4BN while JPMorgan anticipates roughly €3BN in new bonds.

But the biggest surprise in today’s announcement was the present for its latest batch of bond buyers: a cash tender offer for its existing 4.75% bonds due in 2019 – the same bonds that were issued in 2014 – which will be bought back at a price of 102.6. The 2019 bond have jumped in recent weeks, with the yield dropping around 15bps, though as Bloomberg notes “hardly anything has traded as is usual in Greek bonds.” The bond was priced around 102.25 ahead of the announcement, before rising another 30c.

Greek 10Y bonds are currently yielding 5.28%. Putting this in context, at the peak of the financial crisis in 2012, when Greece was expected to leave the euro area, the yield surged to a record 44.21 percent.

With the latest bond sale, Tsipras government is seeking to pave a path for an exit from the current bailout program, which ends in August 2018, while also capping the country’s financing needs in 2019, expected to be about 19 billion euros ($ 22.1 billion). After not being able to convince creditors to reduce its debt burden and being left out of the European Central Bank’s bond-purchase program, Greece is testing the market, although it still remains to be seen if Greece will be added to the ECB’s QE program.

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