HBOS bails out own fund as effect of credit crisis spreads

The credit crisis inched closer to the heart of the British financial system yesterday as HBOS, the banking group, disclosed that it was bailing out a vast in-house fund that has been struggling to finance itself.HBOS, which owns Halifax and Bank of Scotland, said that it would extend credit to Grampian, a $37 billion (£19 billion) Jersey-registered debt- financed fund, until market conditions improved.The move came as the Bank of England disclosed that it had provided £314 million of emergency funding to a financial institution that it did not name, but which is understood to be Barclays.Grampian, a so-called conduit or credit arbitrage fund, holds asset- backed securities and normally finances its investments by issuing short-term commercial paper. However, demand for commercial paper has dried up as banks and investors shun all but the most risk-free of assets in a flight to ultra-safe government bonds.function pictureGalleryPopup(pubUrl,articleId) {var newWin = window.open(pubUrl+'template/2.0-0/element/pictureGalleryPopup.jsp?id='+articleId+'&&offset=0&§ionName=IndustrySectorsBankingFinance','mywindow','menubar=0,resizable=0,width=615,height=655');}HBOS’s decision to finance Grampian from its own resources means that it may have to raise £19 billion within six months — and most of that within weeks unless credit conditions improve. The average maturity of the Grampian commercial paper is just 55 days.HBOS said: “Grampian will use facilities provided by HBOS to repay maturing asset-backed commercial paper until such time as market pricing improves to a level acceptable to HBOS.” The group said that the action would “have no material adverse impacts on HBOS” and added that it had liquidity lines sufficient to repay the entire £19 billion. Grampian’s assets are held on the HBOS balance sheet, but do not have to be marked to market, enabling HBOS to ride out the storm without having to make big writedowns, according to one well-placed source. The fund is thought to have only about $300 million in securities backed by American sub-prime mortgages.Many banks have built up conduits in recent years, but Grampian is the biggest in the world, equivalent to 57 per cent of HBOS’s £33 billion stock market value. Until recently conduits have been able to borrow short term at low rates and invest proceeds in higher-yielding longer-maturity securities.Sources described Barclays’s use of the Bank’s emergency facility, which is priced at a punitive 1 per cent above base rate, as an operational issue and not related to fears over liquidity. It is the first time that the facility has been used since the credit market soured.