Revealed: ECB Secretly Hands Cash to Select Corporations

It has been doing so via "private placements." These debt sales are not open to the broader market. There's no need for a prospectus. Only a small number of institutional investors participate. It allows companies to raise cash quickly, without jumping through the normal hoops. Private placements are not unusual. What's new is that the ECB used them to buy bonds...

According to Apostolos Gkoutzinis, head of European capital markets at law firm Shearman & Sterling, cited by The Wall Street Journal: because there is no prospectus or the other formalities required in a normal bond offering, "there won't be any transparency, there won't be a press release. It's all done discreetly."

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Now, the race is on for eligible companies to wet their beaks in this new, much more discreet free-money fountain, while so-called "investors" scramble to divine what the biggest fish in the pond is about to buy next. If they're lucky they may even get a heads-up straight from the horse's mouth.The ECB's favorite banks will also get juicy fees underwriting the deals. The Journal reported that Credit Suisse has already "reshuffled its coverage of national central banks" in an attempt to tap into the new market.

...According to The Journal, Citigroup figured "that bonds eligible for ECB purchases have already outperformed ineligible bonds by roughly 30% since the bond-buying program was announced in March."

It's Financial Darwinism writ on a heretofore unimaginable scale. Thanks to ECB intervention, Europe's biggest companies with the strongest finances -- including some that are majority state-owned such as French energy giant EDF -- are gaining access to funds (many of them public) quicker, more easily, and at cheaper rates than anyone else in the market. From now on, they may even get the money in secret.