PrefBlog

There was a very gratifying article about the lopsided (disfunctional?) CDS Market today in the Financial Times reprinted by Naked Capitalism:

“The credit default swap market has become lopsided,” says Peter Fisher, co-head of fixed income at BlackRock Financial Management in New York. “It’s not deep and liquid the way we normally think of that — it’s more like an insurance market in which few want to write insurance and many want to buy.”
…
In a normal world or in a world where the derivative is closely tied to the underlying cash security, if the price of the derivative became utterly divorced, market operators would step in to trade away the difference, Mr Fisher adds.

But volumes in the credit derivatives market exploded precisely because most of the bonds hardly trade at all. At Goldman Sachs, for example, for every three dollars of trading in bonds, the firm trades $97 in credit default swaps.

As I mused on February 21:

Despite my interest in the asset class, I’m not convinced that the CDS market is ready for prime time. If their main attraction is the ability to lever up a portfolio significantly, then a huge degree of uncertainty is introduced into pricing, in addition to the uncertainty introduced by debt decoupling. I continue to wrestle with the idea, but these twin, undiversifiable uncertainties probably introduce a required risk premium that makes inclusion of these instruments, long or short, in a fixed income portfolio uneconomic.

Treasury Secretary Paulson has announced an initiative to make everybody feel good:

The group also will propose directing credit-rating firms and regulators to differentiate between ratings on complex structured products and conventional bonds. In addition, it wants rating firms to disclose conflicts of interest and details of their reviews and to heighten scrutiny of outfits that originate loans that are enveloped by various securities.
…
Mr. Paulson also is planning to encourage the development of a domestic market for “covered bonds,” bonds issued by banks that are secured by mortgages. Popular in Europe, these could be an alternative to securitization. When mortgages are securitized, they generally leave bank balance sheets and banks don’t hold capital against them; covered bonds remain on bank books, and banks must set aside capital to back them.

Covered bonds will be familiar to PrefBlog’s Assiduous Readers. The separate credit rating scale for structured securities is cosmetic nonsense and simply represents more political interference with credit ratings. “Don’t downgrade XYZ, it’s a big employer in my district!”.

In yet another disturbing development, it is felt that indices might attract shorts, therefore don’t have indices:

Markit Group Ltd. shelved plans to create an index that would have allowed investors to bet on the $200 billion market for securities backed by auto loans.

Markit Director Ben Logan confirmed the index was put on hold because of a lack of support from dealers.

The decision follows criticism from analysts at Merrill Lynch & Co. and Wachovia Corp., who said the index would drive down prices of the underlying bonds. Markit had been in talks with firms including Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley, and Bear Stearns Cos. to create and index allowing investors to speculate on auto-loan securities from issuers such as Detroit-based GMAC LLC and Ford Motor Credit Co.

In happier news, S&P opines that the worst of the write-downs is over:

Standard & Poor’s said the end is in sight for subprime-mortgage writedowns by the world’s financial institutions.

Writedowns from subprime securities will probably rise to $285 billion, New York-based S&P said today in a report. The ratings company previously estimated losses of $265 billion in January. S&P raised its estimate because of increased loss assumptions for collateralized debt obligations.

“The positive news is that, in our opinion, the global financial sector appears to have already disclosed the majority of valuation writedowns” on subprime debt, S&P credit analyst Scott Bugie said in an accompanying statement. Losses on other debt such as leveraged loans are still likely to increase, the report said.

The actual report is available from S&P – thanks to Accrued Interest, who found the link and commented on the implications:

Anyway, so people love to talk about what inning we’re in when it comes to the subprime crisis. But let’s be more positive about it, shall we? We’re in the first inning of the healing process. The subprime contagion has decimated broker/dealer capital. That phase is probably wrapping up.

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney gave a speech today that was also soothing in its message:

some of the world’s largest financial institutions have recorded substantial losses, the cost of borrowing has increased, and the availability of credit has decreased. More than seven months on, the end is not yet in sight, although it is safe to say that we have reached the end of the beginning of this turmoil. This is not because the dislocations in markets have eased; in fact, strains in financial markets have intensified recently, but rather because we are entering a new phase where policy-makers and market participants have a better understanding of both the shortcomings in the current financial system and what needs to be done – by both groups – to address them.

Mr. Carney gave some very strong indications of his desires for financial market reforms going forward; the speech is important enough that I will attempt to review it thoroughly tomorrow.

The preferred market was weak again on more light volume, with the general malaise resulting in some violent pricing moves when some players absolutely had to get some selling done (RY.PR.F was particularly noteworthy). The PerpetualDiscount index has had only one up-day in the twelve trading days following February 26 and is currently down 2.78% from its 2/26 level.

There were nine other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.