Provided by the Business Insider's Simone Foxman:
For the majority of a nerve-wracking summit that dragged on more than 10 hours, from 6 PM CET Wednesday to 4 AM CET Thursday morning, all attempts at progress to stem the crisis appeared to hit a wall.
But EU leaders finally made a breakthrough.
At 3:30 AM CET, we heard that they were closing talks with bank representatives on "voluntary" 50% haircuts on holdings of Greek bonds. Then we started hearing about leverage, and suddenly — at 4 AM CET (10 PM EST) — we finally got word of some agreement.
So here's the rundown of what leaders decided (EU leaders were still pretty vague about all the numbers, however, citing estimates for most things):
- 50% haircuts on private holdings of Greek bonds through 2020. Evidently this will still be voluntary. It would cut Greece's debt by €100 billion ($139 billion). German Chancellor Angela Merkel said EU leaders aim to see the credit swap take place in January.
- Leverage will increase the firepower of the European Financial Stability Facility by 4-5 times, to somewhere in the range of €1 trillion ($1.4 trillion).
- China and the IMF could play a huge role in the bailout. Not only has the IMF expressed interest in playing a role, French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters that he will call Chinese Premier Hu Jintao around midday tomorrow, presumably to discuss this.
- Greece will receive €130 billion ($180 billion) in fresh aid. We're thinking this includes the nearly €110 billion ($150 billion) it was promised back in July.
- EU leaders believe Italy's commitment to debt sustainability and encouraging growth, even though Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi didn't propose any new measures to accomplish these goals in a letter he wrote to some members of the summit today.
- The European Banking Authority estimates that only €106 billion ($147 billion) in funding will be needed to recapitalize European banks and help them meet capital requirements of 9%. Turns out it didn't actually conduct new stress tests accounting for adverse scenarios this time around. European Council President Herman van Rompuy told reporters that banks must reach this 9% ratio with only the "highest quality capital." We're hoping he means Tier 1 capital and will not allow banks to use riskier convertible bonds to meet this number.
- We aren't likely to see a final roadmap on EU treaty changes until March 2012.
- A statement from the summit can be found here.
Clearly there's still a lot more progress to be made towards truly solving the crisis. None of these steps alone — or even altogether — will do that, not to mention that the numbers we're seeing here have not all been written in stone. Indeed, until we see EU authorities start to execute some of these proposals, it will be difficult to bank on their success.
That said, the fact that EU leaders actually made (at least preliminarily) plans on a lot of the issues they said they would — particularly after all the negative news today and earlier this week — will reassure markets that these leaders are indeed capable of accomplishing something when pressed.
Looking forward, we will be looking to see EU leaders make good on these proposals, without diluting them to ineffectiveness. In particular, treaty changes — probably the most controversial of any measures we've heard discussed thus far — will be key to actually mending the broken bones of the euro area.
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