DOJ Investigating CDS MarketHere come the cops!July 14 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Justice Department is investigating the market for credit-default swaps, according to Markit Group Ltd., the data provider majority-owned by Wall Street’s largest banks.
Is this real or a dog-and-pony show?
No idea.
But as I have said before, here's my view on the CDS market:
It is a bucket shop nightmare. Banks control the bid process and transparency is nil. Since the trades are all over-the-counter there is no published central bid/offer/size/open interest information available to investors on an open, equal-access basis. This keeps spreads wide which the dealers love, since their primary source of income on these instruments is in fact the spread. What's worse is that instead of representing your order as a customer in the market, the dealers have an incentive to deal inside the trade, that is, as a "bucket shop" with your "trade" never actually being represented in the market at all! This sort of behavior (where you're actually trading against the house, not in the market) is illegal in the securities (and FX) markets in general - but not in the CDS marketplace.
The asymmetry of information is intentional. If open interest, bid, offer and size were to be published the bank's would be unable to maintain wide spreads on these contracts - they would contract to just a few basis points.
Asymmetric information creates systemic risk. If you don't know who holds what in terms of open interest, you have no way as a regulator to assess potential interconnectedness or whether proper margin supervision is being maintained or where concentrations of risk may reside. We now know for a fact that margin supervision has not been maintained, as AIG was asymmetrically exposed vastly beyond its capital adequacy. There is no particular reason to believe this is an isolated circumstance either; current dealers, which happen to be the humongous banks, may claim to have balanced positions (that is, no real exposure even though notional contract value outstanding is ridiculous in size) but there is no possible way to validate that claim without exposure of positions through central clearing and a central counterparty. Note that AIG said nothing about being asymmetrically exposed until it blew up - in fact, they made public statements to the contrary less than a year prior!
Asymmetric information and secrecy makes possible financial arson. The lack of insurable interest plus the ability to control information flow makes it trivial for severely-lopsided positions to be put on and maintained, leading to a perverse incentive to create self-fulfilling prophecies via intentional acts of financial sabotage. This doesn't work in the options market because the market-maker on the other side immediately hedges his position with a counterbalancing trade and when that gets expensive the price of the option goes up (a LOT!) to cover the risk, and in addition the open interest is public along with trade volume, allowing everyone to see "what's up" immediately. Evil requires secrecy!
The DOJ is right to be looking into this, but are they looking in the right places and with the right intent?
Who knows - neither the DOJ or Markit is talking, at least not at present.
I await the possibility of being pleasantly surprised by the appearance, no matter how fleeting, of a cop on the scene.
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Ghe, zou hier iets uit voort komen

, juist nu