Don't pin all your hopes on SME asset-backed securities
Here's a neat chart from JP Morgan (h/t @debtnerd) (larger version here ) What it says, essentially, is that although the total amount of Euro SME loans currently in issue looks sizeable, by the time you have removed all the loans that would be ineligible for securitisation and purchase by the ECB for one reason or another, there is not much left. Securitising and purchasing 10.3bn Euros worth of SME loans is not going to make a great deal of difference to the distressed periphery. So the idea must be that the presence of the ECB in the SME ABS market would spur loan issuance. To make a significant difference to credit conditions in the periphery and repair the broken monetary policy transmission mechanism, that loan issuance would have to be simply huge and concentrated in periphery countries. There are several problems with this, to my mind. Firstly,it makes a huge assumption about the scale of potential demand for credit in the periphery from creditworthy SMEs. Is d...