Cyprus’s central bank and its Greek bonds

by Ralph Atkins

Financial Times
February 22, 2012

European Central Bank communication was not at its most brilliant ahead of this week’s deal on a second bail-out for Greece. Nothing has been said formally about the bond swaps, which will circumvent forced losses on Greek government bonds acquired as part of its eurozone crisis-fighting measures or by individual eurozone central banks for their investment portfolios. We still do not know, officially, the size of those holdings.

The result has been a lot of misinformation. One commonly held assumption is that some of the eurozone’s monetary institutions had worrying levels of exposure – for instance Cyprus’s central bank. In fact, the amount of Greek bonds it holds are much lower, I have been told by someone who has seen its figures.

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