Infrastructure/Regulation

ASF 2009 highlights challenges for securitisation market

The annual conference for securitisation professionals, held in Las Vegas, showed that the industry is under no illusions about the difficulties it is currently going through, but that there is a collective will to turn the situation round. Mark Kahn of…

Swap shop

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, under its chief executive Bob Pickel (right), is the trade body for dealers of, amongst other things, credit derivatives. As such, Pickel and his members are at the centre of a storm raging around the…

What to do with the toxic debt

The issue of how to tackle the vast quantities of impaired assets lingering on banks' balance sheets has given rise to several possible solutions, chief among which is the notion of a 'bad bank'. Credit asks five market participants how such a scheme…

Roche

An in-depth look at the primary market's most innovative transactions. This month: the $16bn deal from Swiss pharma firm Roche, and Westpac's yen issue

Missing link

Banks are unable - or unwilling - to hold bond inventory for resale in the secondary markets, meaning that their traditional role as middleman in the buying and selling of bonds is not being fulfilled. William Rhode looks at whether things will continue…

Madoff feeders' due diligence attacked as lawsuits mount

Investors that lost billions of dollars to Bernard Madoff have filed several class-action lawsuits claiming massive due diligence failures by fund managers who placed money into the alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme, even though scant detail has emerged…

New single-name CDS sparks hedging worries

Plans to reshape the US single-name credit default swap (CDS) market are causing concerns among some credit portfolio managers, due to a limit on their ability to get capital relief for hedges under Basel II.