Collateralised debt obligations (CDOs)
Restructuring reservations
Restructuring
A trick too far
Monolines
Rating agencies conflicts of interests revealed in SEC report
Daily news headlines
Credit too hot to handle
Some distributors in Asia are offering first-to-default retail credit notes that give sovereign exposure, signalling a revival of interest in credit. But heavy mark-to-market losses and the use of CDOs as underlying collateral in previous issues have…
Explaining the Levy base correlation smile
Joao Garcia and Serge Goossens look at base expected loss at maturity both in the Gaussian copula and Levy-based models, and link it to base correlation in these frameworks. They report on the existence of smile in both base correlation curves and…
Risk reallocation
The originate-and-distribute model offered a means for banks to offload credit risk from their balance sheets and distribute it to investors. But Andrew Haldane and Lewis Webber of the Bank of England argue this risk was often passed on to those least…
A trick of the credit tail
Leveraged super-senior (LSS) trades represent a mechanism for packaging senior credit risk. Many LSS structures have been issued to date and yet there seems to be no formal pricing approach. In this article, Jon Gregory discusses the valuation of LSS…
FSF calls for rating agency changes to aid market
Banks, investors and rating agencies are bracing themselves for a barrage of new regulatory guidance, consultation papers and capital charges in the wake of a report by the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) on April 12, which made a series of…
Tails of the unexpected
Credit Models
Losses and lawsuits
Monolines
Emerging markets could produce next boom-bust cycle
As regulators clamp down on securitised products, leveraged investors are racing to new markets. JP Morgan analysts say the crisis might be shifting leverage from structured products to emerging markets.
Banks pack ailing debt into PDCF collateral
Investment banks could be getting rid of unsaleable high-risk loans by using them as collateral to borrow funds from the Federal Reserve through the primary dealer credit facility (PDCF).
Non-recourse redoubt
Non-recourse financing
Cat bonds find their calling
Catastrophe bonds
CDPCs under pressure
CDPCS
Going going gone
Auction rate securities
Market-implied Archimedean copulas
Computations of implied copulas are a central element in producing loss distributions of bespoke portfolios and pricing their tranches. This process is made feasible by the availability of index tranche pricing data. Luigi Vacca shows how it is possible…
A trick of the credit tail
Credit derivatives
Going the wrong way
Counterparty Credit Risk