Possible Structures for the IILM Liquidity Instrument

Monday, 13 June 2011 21:35 by tabdulbasser

In an another excellent article, Blake Gould runs down the possible structures for the Interntional Islamic Liquidity Management (IILM) 

The International Islamic Liquidity Management Corporation (IILM) announced that it plans to issue the first short-term liquidity management instruments by the end of 2011. This is disappointing because the products are needed, the sooner the better. However, it is usually better to get it right than just to get it out there quickly. The size of the first issue will likely have a minimum size of $300 million, depending on demand, which is tiny compared to the volume of commodity murabaha contracts used for liquidity management which is estimated at $1.2 trillion.

No structure has been announced yet for the IILM, but it would likely not be commodity murabaha, which is not tradable. An article from Bernama describes (citing Mohd Razif Abudl Kadir, the deputy governor of Bank Negara Malaysia): “the main function of the IILM is to issue high quality papers as the shareholders are the central banks, which recognise it as eligible papers that can be traded among the players”. Commodity murabaha (all murabaha) is not tradable on the secondary market outside of Malaysia except at par because it represents a debt receivable, subject to restrictions on trading in debt (bai al-dayn). He added that the maturity can be short-, medium- and long-term and gave the specific example that “it can be an avenue for the Malaysian government to tap global funds for the Mass Rail Transit mega-project”. The Mass Rail Transit mega-project is a nearly 10 year project to put in 150km of rail in the Kuala Lumpur area by 2020 that is estimated to cost RM36.6 billion ($12.1 billion).

From this point, it is only speculation what the IILM product will look like, there are a few established and developing liquidity management tools (described well by Simmons & Simmons in a document from 2008 [PDF]; they are the basis of the descriptions I provide of the products):

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