Salame joins Tanemura as co-head of credit derivatives at Goldman

Goldman Sachs has promoted head of credit trading for Europe and Asia, Pablo Salame, to co-head of global credit derivatives alongside Ron Tanemura, who was previously sole global head of credit derivatives.

Tanemura, currently based in London, will re-locate to New York in January to run the credit derivatives team in North America. He told RiskNews that the new management structure underscores a major strategic commitment by the firm to become a leading participant in the credit derivatives business.

Goldman Sachs has been pushing to close the gap between its credit derivatives operations and those of JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. It has become involved in a number of industry initiatives aimed at growing the overall synthetic credit business.

The US investment bank is involved in a project called Intex aimed at providing updated collateralised debt obligation (CDO) information to investors, it endorsed the equity pricing tool developed by New York-based RiskMetrics called CreditGrades, and drove the development to create an industry standard reference entity database for users of credit default swaps – the so-called Project Red initiative

Goldman Sachs snared Tanemura from Deutsche Bank – where he headed global credit derivatives – in 2000 to replace its retiring credit derivatives head Scott Pinkus.