BERLIN, Germany — Let’s say Greece declared tomorrow that it was bust. The government took a look at the estimated $495 billion it owes to banks, other institutional investors and foreign governments and decided it simply couldn’t pay.
Who would actually lose their money? The answer, not surprisingly, is complicated.
Much of the focus has been on the debt owned by European banks and fear that a Greek default could spark a “contagion” — in which banks losing money owed by Greece would cut back their lending, causing the financial system to seize up as it did in 2008 after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
But beyond the focus on banks, there are all kinds of pension funds and other institutional investors that hold large amounts of Greek debt. These debt holders are much harder to identify because, unlike banks, the investors don’t reveal it in annual reports and through stress tests.
The other mystery factor is credit default swaps, a derivative that creditors buy to effectively insure themselves against a default by a debtor. These are what draws the United States into the fraught euro zone web. While the United States has little direct exposure to Greek debt, it owns a lot of these CDSs on Greek debt — meaning Americans fear a Greek default for a good reason.
