By Seydina Alioune NDIAYE, Economist, Investment Banker, SENQUANT
Briefing. In trading rooms and among financial analysts focused on the case of Senegal, the debt crisis is not only playing out on the front of external debt, but increasingly on that of domestic debt: Total Return Swaps (TRS) have become a central concern. The issue is no longer just technical; it touches on the transparency of debt, the cost of public financing, and the sustainability of the active debt management strategy.
An increasingly domestic debt crisis
After the scandal of the “hidden debt” and the closure of access to international bond markets and IMF financing, Senegal has turned more towards the regional market in CFA francs for funding. The WAEMU market has thus become its “main funding channel”, with nearly 4,000 billion CFA francs raised in the previous year, or about 7 billion USD.
This evolution is important for the analysis of the Senegalese crisis. It means that the country’s budget constraint no longer depends only on the price of its eurobonds or its relations with external donors, but also on its ability to continue placing securities on the regional market at reasonable rates. However, upon analysis, this domestic debt mechanism was already starting to overheat, with rising yields and more difficult placements.
What are TRS in this context?
In the Senegalese case, TRS appear as a mechanism by which the State uses its domestic debt as collateral to obtain international financing. Through this mechanism, Senegal would have mobilized more than 1 billion euros in this way, notably with the Africa Finance Corporation, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and other international banks, for a 3-year operation with a collateralization ratio of 135% on domestic bonds.
In other words, Senegal is not only issuing debt in the regional market; it also relies on this debt as a guarantee to raise additional resources internationally. This can offer short-term cash relief, but the setup increases the interconnection between domestic and external debt, making it more complex to assess the real sovereign risk in the future in case of debt restructuring.
Why would TRS be toxic?
The first problem is that of opacity. Renowned debt specialists Lee Buchheit and Mitu Gulati’s paper reveals that this type of operation can be used to “disguise” the real economic substance of debt, precisely because it operates outside the conventional debt reporting frameworks (Debt Sustainability Analysis framework, WB and IMF). For a country under financial strain, this camouflage can delay investors’, rating agencies’, or international financial institutions’ perception of risk, without eliminating that risk.
The second problem is the over-sizing of collateral. When an operation is covered at 135%, it means that the value of the pledged securities must remain sufficient to reassure creditors. If the value of these bonds decreases, or if yields rise too sharply, margin calls or offset clauses can be triggered, creating additional vulnerability for Senegal’s Treasury.
The critical point for Senegal: the threshold of 3-year bonds
Some of Senegal’s TRS operations would reference 3-year bonds, notably a 2028 bond issued at a slightly lower yield than 8%. Therefore, the increase in yields of domestic 3-year bonds no longer represents just a classic increase in financing costs; it could also affect the stability of already concluded TRS setups.
Thus, in several UMOA-Titres auctions, Senegal placed its 3-year debt at a yield slightly above 8%, while rejecting between a third and half of the offers (source UMOA Titres). An auction mentioned in the document shows a weighted average yield of 8.09% on the 3-year OAT, with an absorption rate of only 56.60%, while the 1-year bill stands at 7.46%.
These figures can be seen as a symptom of defensive arbitrage by the State. By rejecting a significant portion of submissions, Senegal may seek to avoid paying excessively high rates at first glance. However, a second reading also suggests that it may want to prevent an increase in yields that could put pressure on the margin clauses related to TRS.
TRS as a crisis management tool — and as a risk factor
From the authorities’ perspective, TRS can be seen as a crisis management tool. When a State is temporarily excluded from traditional international markets, has an urgent need for liquidity, and still has a stock of mobilizable domestic securities, a TRS can provide financing without resorting to a regular external bond issuance. In this logic, TRS acts as a cash bridge.
But in Senegal’s case, this bridge can become a trap. The more the State depends on domestic debt for financing, the more it must preserve the value and liquidity of this debt; and the more this debt serves as collateral for external financing, the more the management of domestic auctions becomes constrained by considerations that are not entirely visible to the market. Hence the observed overheating and the increase in Senegal’s rates (8.08%, higher than Mali paying 7.89%). The political and economic cost is then twofold and it is paid: an increase in refinancing costs on one side, a decrease in transparency on the other – hence market actors’ uncertainty.
Strategically, what active debt management has produced as a result could be likened to a gradual compression of the domestic financing space, in which the State of Senegal has mobilized its own obligations as collateral to buy time. However, time is running out and Senegal is backed into a corner.
Ultimately, one may wonder if in Senegal, have TRS solved the debt crisis? Our opinion is that they have rather shifted the pressure to the domestic market and made debt management more opaque. By providing temporary access to external liquidity through domestic collateral, they may have delayed adjustment/treatment, but at the cost of increased dependence on increasingly costly local auctions.
From this perspective, the real issue is not only whether TRS have avoided an immediate crisis in Senegal, but whether they have contributed to further weakening budget sustainability in the medium term. It becomes relevant then to question three key points: the domestication of the debt crisis, the opacity of collateralized financing setups, and the risk that an instrument designed to buy time ends up reducing the State’s room for maneuver.
