Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 5.0 (Schweiz), University of Zurich (Wirtschaftswissenschaften), language: English, abstract: The current developments in the credit or bond markets, influenced by the financial crisis and the economic downturn, revive a discussion about credit derivatives as an instrument of speculation and one cause or determinant of the financial crisis. Currently, CDS are used to speculate against the solvency of the different governments. Critics look at CDS contracts as Overthecounter (OTC) instruments that are not regulated and as bilateral contracts which can have a big influence on the financial position of market participants and on the real credit markets. CDS contracts are mainly instruments for investors to insure against a default of the debtor. For the seller of the CDS they are a possibility to participate in risks he perhaps could not have taken on the bond markets otherwise. These contracts separate the default risk of the debtor from the market conditions, e.g. the market interest rates. They make it possible to only trade the credit risk of a company or a country. Therefore, they can be instruments to proof the bond values and indicators for the real credit risk of the underlying. The discussion about CDS contracts is mostly a discussion including many prejudices and it deals with aspects from different topics which cannot be mixed. Therefore, a clear picture of advantages and disadvantages and especially values and risks of CDS is difficult to be found in the current public discussion and economic newspaper articles. A further phenomenon is that bond markets and CDS markets have lost their connection in the financial crisis. So the credit risk on both markets is valued differently: the prices on the two markets differed so much that market participants used these arbitrage possibilities to earn credit riskfree money for themselves and their customers It can be traded with a simple combination of the underlying bond and the fitting CDS contract. One of the causes of the basis can be the different liquidity level in the two separated markets. For the development of the basis during the crisis it is important to ask how big the changes are compared to the situation before the financial crisis and also how important the credit rating or the industry of the reference entity is.. The price difference, if the CDS price is lower than the credit risk priced by the bond of the same reference entity, is negative basiscalled

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: A, Union Graduate College, course: Money, Markets and Banking, language: English, abstract: A credit default swap is essentially an insurance contract to hedge credit risk. It is a type of derivative whose value depends on the likelihood of a company defaulting. In this type of derivative two parties enter a contract where one party agrees to pay another in the event of a company defaulting on bond payments (also known as a credit event) for a premium or spread. CDS played a pivotal role in the recent financial crisis. It is also due to CDS that the crisis in the US housing market grew to a danger for the global capital markets. They were mainly responsible for the fall of insurance giant AIG and other turmoil over the course of the financial crisis. In this paper the nature and history of CDS is examinzed and their role in the financial crisis analyzed.

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Credit default swaps are by far the most often traded credit derivatives and the credit default swap markets have seen tremendous growth over the past two decades. Put simply, a credit default swap is a tradeable contract that provides insurance against the default of a certain debtor. Initially, when the first form of a credit default swap (CDS) was traded in 1991, they were mainly used by commercial banks in order to lay off credit risk to insurance companies. However, focus shifted in the subsequent years as new players entered the market. Hedge funds became big players, money managers and reinsurers entered, and banks started to not only buy protection on their assets but also sell protection in order to diversify their portfolios. All this led to today s CDS market being dominated by investors rather than banks and, as a consequence, CDSs are now structured to meet investors needs instead of those of the banks. Over the same time as this shift to an investor orientated market took place, CDS markets grew at an astonishing rate with notional amount outstanding pretty much doubling every year until peaking in the second half of 2007 at USD 62,173.20 billions. The need to effciently transfer credit risk as well as the increasing standardization of CDS contracts by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association propelled this development. Only in 2008 did the notional amount outstanding in CDSs retract for the first time and come down to USD 31,223.10 billion in the first half of 2009. A partial reason was the full blown financial crisis in which CDSs also played a prominent role. The demise of Lehman Brothers, for example, triggered roughly USD 400 billion in protection payments and American International Group needed to be bailed out in 2008 because it had sold too much CDS protection. Amongst other concerns, these incidents highlight the systemic importance of CDSs. Combined with the phenomenal growth of CDS markets, this makes CDSs a highly relevant component of the current ?nancial environment and a fruitful subject for academic research. Today, just like most other financial instruments, CDSs serve a multitude of purposes spanning hedging, speculation, and arbitrage. The aim of this thesis is to explore these uses further and answer the following research questions: What CDS trading strategies are commonly used and how does a selection of these strategies CDS curve trades including forward CDSs, [...]

Credit Default Swaps: A Survey is the most comprehensive review of all major research domains involving credit default swaps (CDS). CDS have been growing in importance in the global financial markets. However, their role has been hotly debated, in industry and academia, particularly since the credit crisis of 2007-2009. The authors review the extant literature on CDS that has accumulated over the past two decades and divide the survey into seven topics after providing a broad overview in the introduction. The second section traces the historical development of CDS markets and provides an introduction to CDS contract definitions and conventions. The third section discusses the pricing of CDS, from the perspective of no-arbitrage principles, structural, and reduced-form credit risk models. It also summarizes the literature on the determinants of CDS spreads, with a focus on the role of fundamental credit risk factors, liquidity and counterparty risk. The fourth section discusses how the development of the CDS market has affected the characteristics of the bond and equity markets, with an emphasis on market efficiency, price discovery, information flow, and liquidity. Attention is also paid to the CDS-bond basis, the wedge between the pricing of the CDS and its reference bond, and the mispricing between the CDS and the equity market. The fifth section examines the effect of CDS trading on firms' credit and bankruptcy risk, and how it affects corporate financial policy, including bond issuance, capital structure, liquidity management, and corporate governance. The sixth section analyzes how CDS impact the economic incentives of financial intermediaries. The seventh section reviews the growing literature on sovereign CDS and highlights the major differences between the sovereign and corporate CDS markets. The eighth section discusses CDS indices, especially the role of synthetic CDS index products backed by residential mortgage-backed securities during the financial crisis. The authors close with our suggestions for promising future research directions on CDS contracts and markets.

This book, unique in its composition, reviews the academic empirical literature on how CDSs actually work in practice, including during distressed times of market crises. It also discusses the mechanics of single-name and index CDSs, the theoretical costs and benefits of CDSs, as well as comprehensively summarizes the empirical evidence on important aspects of these instruments of risk transfer. Full-time academics, researchers at financial institutions, and students will benefit from the dispassionate and comprehensive summary of the academic literature; they can read this book instead of identifying, collecting, and reading the hundreds of academic articles on the important subject of credit risk transfer using derivatives and benefit from the synthesis of the literature provided.

We investigate the pricing of sovereign credit risk over the period 2008-2010 for selected advanced economies by examining two widely-used indicators: sovereign credit default swap (CDS) and relative asset swap (RAS) spreads. Cointegration analysis suggests the existence of an imperfect market arbitrage relationship between the cash (RAS) and the derivatives (CDS) markets, with price discovery taking place in the latter. Likewise, panel regressions aimed at uncovering the fundamental drivers of the two indicators show that the CDS market, although less liquid, has provided a better signal for sovereign credit risk during the period of the recent financial crisis.

In reduced-form pricing models, it is usual to assume a fixed recovery rate to obtain the probability of default from credit default swap prices. An alternative credit risk measure is proposed here: the maximum recovery rate compatible with observed prices. The analysis of the recent debt crisis in Argentina using this methodology shows that the correlation between the maximum recovery rate and implied default probabilities turns negative in advance of the credit event realization. This empirical finding suggests that the maximum recovery rate can be used for constructing early warning indicators of financial distress.