Who’s Counting The PSI Participation?

Let me put this out there before I get started: I do not have an opinion on how many people will participate in this wig wearing pig of a Greek default. I don’t know how many people will voluntarily (or involuntarily under the guise of voluntary action) agree to take the haircut.

I also don’t care how many people agree to take the haircut. It doesn’t change a thing, in my eyes.

But I can’t help but wonder, who’s counting the number of people who are agreeing to this, and against what?

Is it 90% of bonds they need? Or 90% of bondholders? As a case in point, those are very different numbers.

And who’s verifying these counts? Because I hate to be the one to point this out, but banks/governments have a very vested interest in lying about the actual participation rate, regardless of what it is.

That’s the route where they get to screw over more or less everyone who owns sovereign bonds and/or credit guarantees, remember?

How will any of you know what the real participation rate is? Do the Greek bondholders even know who each other are?

Or is this going to be one of those times when an official looking representative, of whom no one seems to recall exactly how they were appointed, gets on stage and assures everyone, “I have just returned from Athens, and let me tell you, there are flying pigs everywhere you go. And talking walnuts with thick Southern accents”?

How is any one of you going to audit these statements, as they are made? Particularly as it appears that most of these “insiders, highly integrated in the Greek bond swap process” are themselves contradicting one another in their claims of the exact participation level?

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