80% Of creditors OK Greek debt swap

About 80 percent of Greece's private creditors agreed to cash in their bonds for new ones with less than half the face value, a senior government official said. The overwhelming approval, reported to The Wall Street Journal, means Greece will go ahead with its landmark debt-restructuring deal, the newspaper reported ahead of the official announcement, set for 8 a.m. Athens time Friday (1 a.m. EST). It also means Greece will almost certainly use legal force to impose approval on unwilling creditors, raising the approval rate to as much as 96 percent, the Journal said. About $273 billion in bonds would be exchanged, slicing about $133 billion from the amount Greece owes. Most Asian stock indexes were up more than 2 percent Friday on the news. As the deal stands, private-sector creditors -- creditors that agreed in October to take a 50 percent loss on the face value of their bonds -- will take a "voluntary" 53.5 percent face-value loss, based on an arrangement worked out last month. New Greek bonds will be issued for trading Monday. Bondholders who submit to the swap, voluntarily or otherwise, will get cash or high-quality short-term bonds issued by the eurozone rescue fund valued at 15 percent of the face value of whatever they exchange, plus a series of Greek bonds maturing over the next 11 to 30 years valued at 31.5 percent, the Journal said. Those two percentages add up to 46.5 percent, or a 53.5 percent face-value loss. The European Union and the IMF demanded completion of the swap before providing $173 billion in new loans to Greece, helping it to avoid defaulting on its remaining debts. Greece's major public-sector creditors are not affected by the restructuring. Those creditors include other eurozone nations, which lent Greece $70 billion, the International Monetary Fund, which lent $27 billion, and the European Central Bank and other national central banks, which bought more than $66 billion of Greek bonds.