Central Counterparties (CCPs) are widely promoted as a requirement for safe banking with little dissent except on technical grounds (such as proliferation of CCPs). Whilst CCPs can have major operational positives, we argue that CCPs have many of the business characteristics of Rating Agencies,...

The basis between swaps referencing funded fixings and swaps referencing overnight-collateralized fixings (e.g. 6 month Euribor vs 6 month Eonia) has increased in importance with the 2007-9 liquidity and credit crises. This basis means that new pricing models for fixed income staples like caps,...

The elephant in the room around CDS, CMBS, CMBX, and CDO pricing is the recovery rate. Practically, whilst recovery swaps exist they are not liquid. The problem is especially acute when upfront payments, or quoted prices, contradict previous recovery rate assumptions, e.g. pre-crisis, 40% for...

Share trading on most major exchanges is anonymous in that only order price, quantity and timing are visible. Traders include in their trading decisions allowance for adverse selection, i.e. the risk that posted bids and asks include private information about future stock price movements. Thus...

Covered bonds have emerged as a potential funding vehicle from the credit crisis. However, there is no detailed examination of how covered bonds should be priced taking into account the features that make them attractive to investors: i.e. over-collateralization of the reference pool and...

Historical (Stressed-) Value-at-Risk ((S)VAR), and Expected Shortfall (ES), are widely used risk measures in regulatory capital and Initial Margin, i.e. funding, computations. However, whilst the definitions of VAR and ES are unambiguous, they depend on input distributions that are...

Credit (CVA), Debit (DVA) and Funding Valuation Adjustments (FVA) are now familiar valuation adjustments made to the value of a portfolio of derivatives to account for credit risks and funding costs. However, recent changes in the regulatory regime and the increases in regulatory capital...

Regulations impose idiosyncratic capital and funding costs for holding derivatives. Capital requirements are costly because derivatives desks are risky businesses; funding is costly in part because regulations increase the minimum funding tenor. Idiosyncratic costs mean no single measure makes...

Funding is a cost to trading desks that they see as an input. Current FVA-related literature reflects this by also taking funding costs as an input, usually constant, and always risk-neutral. However, this funding curve is the output from a Treasury point of view. Treasury must consider...

The effect of self-default on the valuation of liabilities and derivatives (DVA) has been widely discussed but the effect on assets has not received similar attention. Any asset whose value depends on the status, or existence, of the firm will have a DVA. We extend Burgard&Kjaer (2011) to...