ECB’s Targeted LTRO is now a reality. What I would like to examine in this short post is the fact that actual net liquidity injection will not be equal to the TLTRO’s allotment as most people would think but the net result of various liquidity providing operations and LTRO repayments. More specifically, net liquidity will be the sum of:

  1. TLTRO allotment (€82.6bn)
  2. Repayments of earlier 3Y-LTROs which increased substantially after the TLTRO auction (a total of €19.9bn)
  3. Changes in MROs
  4. Changes in maturing (3-month) LTRO rollovers.

Adding today’s 3m-LTRO rollover the data are as follows:

TLTRO net liquidity

Overall, ECB’s first TLTRO managed to inject a total of €48bn of net liquidity. Given the stated target of increasing the ECB balance sheet by close to €1tr it is clear that the operation was a drop in the ocean. European banks most probably used a large chunk of the TLTRO funds in order to replace 3Y-LTRO funding (the corresponding operations mature in a few months time) and MRO liquidity (replace short-term funding at a variable rate with stable long-term funding at a constant rate only 10bp higher than the current MRO rate) rather than to immediately expand their reserve position. Given that the remaining liquidity due to the 2 3Y-LTRO is still well over €300bn and will be maturing in a few months time it seems that a large part of the TLTROs will go in rolling over these reserves instead of creating additional excess liquidity.