zerohedge.com / By Tyler Durden / 12/28/2012 09:35
The ECB’s original bond monetization program (the SMP) may now be defunct, having been replaced with the mythical OMT which will work as long as it never has to be used (see Spain), but its aftereffects linger on. Specifically, the aftermath of the SMP manifests itself in the weekly sterilization of accrued SMP bond purchases, which at last check amounted to some €208.5 billion. Why do we bring this up? Because a few hours earlier, the ECB failed, for the first time, to find enough demand and interest to sterilize the full amount of rolling peripheral bond purchases, and was instead able to find only enough bidders, 43 of them or the lowest in a year, to “sterilize” just €197.6 billion of the total weekly allottment. The last time the ECB failed in a sterilization action? November 29, 2011, one day before the coordinated global central bank bailout of 2011.
In other words, just like last year when things were going from bad to worse in Europe, the old continent’s banks are suddenly facing a major liquidity shortage, which however would not be news to anyone who read our piece from yesterday “Surge In Marginal Lending Facility Usage To One Year Highs Confirms Year End EUR Repatriation” in which we said that Europe’s banks “suddenly find themselves needing gobs of liquidity – not USD-denominated liquidity, but domestic, EUR-based.” Sure enough, today we just got confirmation of how truly bad this issue is.
But what makes things much worse is that sterilization failures like today are not supposed to happen in a post LTRO 1 and 2 world in which the European banks are flush with €1 trillion in excess liquidity. And yet it did.
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