It’s been some four months since our last posting, and we have been hoping for an equally quiet summer. But then we came across a recent article in the American Banker about a new research report by the US Treasury’s Office of Financial Research.

The story and the report are on banks’ use of credit derivatives to reduce their capital requirements. It’s an interesting topic, to be sure, and it’s one that deserves proper consideration and analysis.

So in that spirit, let us offer some thoughts.

Banks constantly search for ways to manage their risk exposures and allocations, and they have different strategies for doing so. They might, for example, make loans and hold them to maturity, and/or they might sell those loans and recycle capital to make new loans, and/or they might buy credit default swap (CDS) protection on those loans to free up capital for new purposes.  All of this is important for economic growth.

If a bank’s risk management activity reduces its exposure (and hence its risk), it follows that its capital requirements should also be lower. That’s the primary motivation behind the credit derivatives activity in question. And it’s long been recognized as legitimate by prudential regulators.

Now, as the report and article state, banks are required to disclose to the Federal Reserve the notional amount of credit derivatives for which they “purchased protection that is recognized as a guarantee for regulatory capital purposes”.

It’s important to note that this information is available for all to see at the National Information Center (which houses data collected by the Federal Reserve System). The data is available on an individual firm basis (and can be accessed under the ‘Institution Search’ tab), as well as on an aggregated basis, segmented by peer group (under the ‘BHCPR Peer Reports’ tab).

What this means: regulators, shareholders and others can see exactly how much CDS protection a bank has bought to improve its regulatory capital position.

What about the counterparties to those credit derivatives trades? Do we know who they are? Firms in the US, European Union and other jurisdictions are now required to report their derivatives trades to trade repositories. In this way, as well as through the normal course of supervision, the answer is yes – regulators have the data in order to see who those counterparties are.

Also worth noting: under the bank capital rules, a bank that enters into CDS transactions needs to take the creditworthiness of its counterparties into consideration in determining the capital it needs to back the trades.

Another key point: under the new margin rules coming into effect, counterparties are required to post initial and variation margin on all non-cleared derivatives trades. Margining helps mitigate counterparty risk; it works to help ensure that a buyer of protection will actually get paid by a seller of protection.