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 use of credit default swaps and their role in the credit crisis. Trigger-happy regulators want to impose a central counterparty clearing house for CDS on the market. As Pickel explains, the market is keen to embrace such a solution – but only if it is done properly. Interview by Matthew Attwood

Throughout the course of the financial crisis certain charged terms have been used again and again to denote the problematic areas of the markets, especially the credit markets. Commentators are especially keen to identify those shadowy areas of the system where the most esoteric structures were put together by the fabled ‘rocket scientists'. But in their understandable enthusiasm to harry the authors of structured credit's worst excesses, many observers have unfairly lumped every failed model