Money, Banking and Financial Markets

Commentary

Commentary

 
 
Posts tagged Over-the-counter
What Risk Professionals Want

As memories of the 2007-09 financial crisis fade, we worry that complacency is setting in. Recent news is not good. In the name of reducing the regulatory burden on small and some medium-sized firms, the Congress and the President enacted legislation that eased the requirements on some of the largest firms. Under the current Administration, several Treasury reports travel the same road, proposing ways to ease regulatory scrutiny of large entities without changing the law (see here, here and here). And, recently, the Federal Reserve Board altered its stress test in ways that make it more likely that poorly managed firms will pass. It also voted not to raise capital requirements on systemically risky banks over the next 12 months.

A few weeks ago, one of us (Steve) had the privilege to speak at the 20th Risk Convention of the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). Founded in 1996, GARP engages in the education and certification of risk professionals and has several hundred thousand members worldwide. (Disclosure: Brandeis International Business School and NYU Stern are GARP Academic Partners.) The organizers allowed us to solicit the views of the 100-plus attendees on two issues that are central to financial resilience: Are bank capital requirements high enough? And, do central counterparties (CCPs) have sufficient loss-absorbing buffers? They answered both questions with a resounding “NO” ….

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Steve Cecchetti and Kim SchoenholtzGARP, Global Association of Risk Professionals, Bank capital, Capital requirements, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, BCBS, Basel III, CCP, Central clearing party, Clearinghouse, Over-the-counter, OTC, Derivatives, Margin, Resolution, Systemic risk, Financial infrastructure, Prepaid guarantee funds, Loss-absorbing resources
Resolution Regimes for Central Clearing Parties

Clean water and electric power are essential for modern life. In the same way, the financial infrastructure is the foundation for our economic system. Most of us take all three of these, water, electricity and finance, for granted, assuming they will operate through thick and thin.

As engineers know well, a system’s resilience depends critically on the design of its infrastructure. Recently, we discussed the chaos created by the October 1987 stock market crash, noting the problems associated with the mechanisms for trading and clearing of derivatives. Here, we take off where that discussion left off and elaborate on the challenge of designing a safe derivatives trading system―safe, that is, in the sense that it does not contribute to systemic risk.

Today’s infrastructure is significantly different from that of 1987. In the aftermath of the 2007-09 financial crisis, authorities in the advanced economies committed to overhaul over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets. The goal is to replace bilateral OTC trading with a central clearing party (CCP) that is the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer....

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Steve Cecchetti and Kim SchoenholtzCCP, Central clearing party, Clearinghouse, Over-the-counter, OTC, Derivatives, Exchange-traded derivatives, Over-the-counter derivatives, Margin, Margin call, Initial margin, Resolution, Stress test, Reverse stress test, Systemic risk, Financial infrastructure, Financial market utility, FMU, Bailout, Capital, Notional value, Swaps, Volatility
Central Clearing Parties: What they are and why we need them - Part 1

G-20 Leaders Vote for CCPs: What are they?

In September 2009, as the financial crisis was starting to slowly recede, the leaders of the twenty largest economies of the world (the G-20) met in Pittsburgh. At the end of their summit, they issued a communiqué of nearly 9000 words. Somewhere in the middle of the statement, the following sentence appeared:

All standardized OTC [over-the-counter] derivative contracts should be traded on exchanges or electronic trading platforms, where appropriate, and cleared through central counterparties by end-2012 at the latest. 

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Kim SchoenholtzG-20, CCP, Derivatives, Clearinghouse, OTC, Over-the-counter, Collateral, Counterparty risk