Hacker News Reader

Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

the bitcoin bond was worse than the existing el salvador bonds in all ways. I.e. you could have bought a normal bond and bitcoin spending the same amount of money and having strictly better returns in all circumstances. And reportedly, nobody bought them[0].

I am not sure that emission scared investors, if anything, had someone showed up to buy them, it would have been free money fo the government.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/el-salvadors-bitcoin...

View on HN

> not sure that emission scared investors

It scared off the IMF [1]. Before that, their dollar bonds plummeted after the Bitcoin announcement [2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-25/imf-board...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-22/bitcoin-b...

That may be one factor, but not the only one. Someone had made graph of the bond prices and added the dates of some government actions and announcements. I'll try to post it below if I find it.

Salvadoran bonds reached their all time high after the Elections in March 2021, because investors expected stability with an officialist majority party in the local congress.

On the first session though. One of the first things the congress did was to change the Supreme Court and the Attorney General.

Did I say all that happened in just two hours, live, in a HD televised session with what I believe scripted dialogs. They even had crane cameras and rail cameras for cinematic effect.

Hard to explain. Just imagine C-SPAN turning from C-SPAN into a reality-show-contest production style. Laws (including your legal tender) being approved in 2 hours with no previous announcements. Sometimes at midnight too.

And let me get to the part when the interpretation of laws can change with a government's official tweet or tv appearance. Yes. Sometimes more than once a day. And sometimes the interpreted law being the opposite of the written law. Sometimes in a foreign language. Really. :)

Imagine living in a reality show where every major change in the plot is announced on Sunday at primetime. Except the reality show is your country. :)

Those changes started worrying bond investors. Many other things, good and bad, have happened ever since, too long to type in a comment.

In less than a year. The 2052 bonds went from an all time high to an all time low. [1]

[1] https://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/bond/usp01012cc84-el-salvado...

> Did I say all that happened in just two hours, live, in a HD televised session with what I believe scripted dialogs. They even had crane cameras and rail cameras for cinematic effect.

Would you have a link to the video by chance?

I couldn't find the high res video but I did find this one in Spanish. https://youtu.be/_H_78hp-vRE

No worries. Thank you!

It was a way to get around bond regulations, the bond is a wrapper around Bitcoin. It’s similar to how some companies buy MSTR because they are not allowed to buy Bitcoin directly, but want some exposure.

but these are junk bonds, it's not like there's pension funds that are going to buy them.

MSTR as a bitcoin proxy made sense at a time when you could not easily own bitcoins, but there are direct ways to do it now anyway (GBTC, BITO).

I am ignorant and I just don't know, but which regulation would forbid you from buying a bitcoin ETF but allow you to buy junk el salvador bonds?

A pension fund might very well be allowed to buy junk bonds since it is a well-known if risky instrument whereas bitcoin ETFs are a newfangled weird instrument that is probably not covered by their guidelines.

I mean allowed in the sense that the investment guidelines set by the board allow it.

Source: I work at a pension fund where I think we are in precisely this situation.

I think in the next few years the pressure for junk bonds like this in pension funds will just grow as inflation rate moves farther away from bond yields.

thanks for your reply!

You are correct that at the time of announcement, if you had believed in Bitcoin and El Salvador (for some reason) it would have been advantageous to simply buy - separately - Salvadoran sovereign debt on the capital markets and Bitcoin on the spot markets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com