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I do not understand this sentence from your excellent report: “AT1s are obviously ‘below’ equity from a hierarchical perspective, but at least some equity in UBS would probably have been expected by the investors.”

From Bloomberg: “In a normal writedown scenario, shareholders are the first to take a hit before AT1 bonds face losses, as Credit Suisse also guided in a presentation to investors earlier this week. However, under the terms of the government-brokered deal, Credit Suisse shareholders are set to receive 3 billion francs. That’s provoked a furious response from some of the AT1 bondholders as it hasn’t accounted for the seniority of CoCos over the lender’s shares in the capital structure. And that’s a big problem for a market that would expect holders to be paid before shareholders.”

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It means that if AT1 bondholders got zero, equity holders should also got no more than 0, as their ranking is behind AT1 bondholders.

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Hmmmm…debt below equity in the hierarchical structure. Very strange, but since these are “COCOs”, convertible contingent obligations, seems like AT1s should’ve converted to equity and gotten paid along with the other equity holders. Watch for AT1 class action, since PIMCO owned a big slug of these.

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