Repurchase Agreement (Repo) Settlement Market Practice

A sale/buy-back is the cash sale and pre-line repurchase of a security. These are two separate pure elements of the cash market, one for settlement in advance. The futures price is set against the spot price in order to obtain a market return. The basic motivation of Sell/Buybacks is generally the same as in the case of a conventional repo (i.e. the attempt to take advantage of the lower financing rates generally available for secured loans, unlike unsecured loans). The profitability of the transaction is also similar, with interest on the money borrowed from the sale/purchase being implicitly included in the difference between the sale price and the purchase price. A pension purchase contract (repo) is a form of short-term borrowing for government bond traders. In the case of a repot, a trader sells government bonds to investors, usually overnight, and buys them back the next day at a slightly higher price. This small price difference is the implied day-to-day rate. Deposits are generally used to obtain short-term capital.

They are also a common instrument of central bank open market operations. The University of Manhattan. „Buyout Contracts and the Law: How Legislative Amendments Fueled the Housing Bubble,“ page 3. Access on August 14, 2020. Under a pension contract, the Federal Reserve (Fed) buys U.S. Treasury bonds, U.S. agency securities or mortgage-backed securities from a primary trader who agrees to buy them back within one to seven days; an inverted deposit is the opposite. This is how the Fed describes these transactions from the perspective of the counterparty and not from its own point of view.

While conventional deposits are generally instruments that are sifted against credit risk, there are residual credit risks. Although this is essentially a guaranteed transaction, the seller may not buy back the securities sold on the due date. In other words, the pension seller does not fulfill his obligation. Therefore, the buyer can keep the warranty and liquidate the guarantee to recover the borrowed money. However, security may have lost value since the beginning of the operation, as security is subject to market movements. To reduce this risk, deposits are often over-insured and subject to a daily market margin (i.e., if the guarantee ends in value, a margin call may be triggered to ask the borrower to reserve additional securities). Conversely, if the value of the guarantee increases, there is a credit risk to the borrower, since the lender is not allowed to resell it. If this is considered a risk, the borrower can negotiate a subsecured repot.

[6] Investment bank Lehman Brothers used deposits dubbed „repo 105“ and „repo 108“ as a creative accounting strategy to support its profitability reports for a few days during the reference season, and incorrectly characterized deposits as true sales.