Fill it up with unregulated — Greek/CDS humor:
Credit default swaps are insurance products. It’s time we regulated them as such. | The Big Picture
…The law created a unique class of financial instruments [credit default swaps or “CDS”] that was neither fish nor fowl: It trades like a financial product but is not a security; it is designed to hedge future prices but is not a futures contract; it pays off in the event of a specific loss-causing event but is not an insurance policy.
Given these enormous exemptions from the usual rules that govern financial products, you can guess what happened with the swaps. A very specific set of economic behaviors emerged: Companies that wrote insurance typically set aside reserves for expected risk of loss and payout. When it came to swaps, the companies that underwrote them had no such obligation.
This had enormous repercussions. The biggest underwriter of default swaps was AIG, the world’s largest insurer. Without that reserve-requirement limitation, it was free to underwrite as many swaps as it could print. And that was just what it did: AIG’s Financial Products unit underwrote more than $3 trillion worth of derivatives, with precisely zero dollars reserved for paying any potential claim.
via Credit default swaps are insurance products. It’s time we regulated them as such. | The Big Picture.
Ex-Product Sketch | The Big Picture
There have been many cries to regulate or ban the existence of Sovereign CDS, both from the sovereigns that felt their nations under attack, and by the masses who see them as one of Satan’s investment bank tools designed to steal from the poor………
But there is a viable alternative. TMM would like to introduce their readers to the humble Bond Future. That long-standing, well-understood derivative that has provided liquidity, transparency and price discovery to bond markets in many countries for 40 years. Bond futures with deliverable bond baskets allow basis trading, speculation and hedging, without the idiosyncrasies of CDS contracts. But of course, futures markets aren’t that profitable for banks… well, you reap what you sow, right?
Euro Bailout Halflife: 48 Hours | ZeroHedge
….every asset class that was designed to benefit from the Euro Summit (rates, sovereign debt, & Italian banks for example) has given up its gains (France CDS widening significantly and EFSF deteriorating also) and the most shocked and still likely scarred (psychologically) equity and credit indices have room to drop here to catch up with that reality – whether the recession on/off switch is triggered or the ‘must-buy-to-avoid-career-risk’ trade is on.
Barclays Explains Why A 50% Greek Haircut “Would Be Considered A Credit Event, Consequently Triggering CDS Contracts” | ZeroHedge
Finally someone dares to go ahead and say what is on everyone’s mind, namely that proclaiming a 60% “haircut” as voluntary is about the dumbest thing to ever come out of ISDA. As is well known, the ECB and the entire Eurozone are terrified of what may happen should Greek CDS be activated, and “contagion waterfall” ensue. The fear is not so much on what happens with Greece, where daily CDS variation margin has long since been satisfied so the only catalyst from a cash flow market perspective would be a formality. Where it won’t be a formality, however, is for the ECB which has been avoiding reality, and which will have to remark its entire array of Greek bonds from par to 40 cents on the dollar, which as Alex Gloy indicated earlier, will render the central bank immediately insolvent all else equal.