Otherwise, the buying and selling of credit derivatives has been completely invisible to the investing public.
Some of these assets are extremely complicated: credit derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit defaults swaps.
Banks bought protection on credit derivatives from monolines in the form of credit-default swaps.
Revenue from credit derivatives will fall as they gravitate towards exchanges, eroding spreads for dealers.
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It did much last year to improve its rules on contracts for credit derivatives.
But dealers in credit derivatives have lately been keen to make their products more reliable.
With these improvements, growth in the market for credit derivatives is likely to continue apace.
The blowup of 2008 was blamed in part on financial innovations such as credit derivatives and subprime mortgages.
That's bound to disappoint Wall Street, reeling from losses linked to holdings of credit derivatives and mortgage securities.
Will the rapid emergence of credit derivatives and the greater role of hedge funds make markets more or less stable?
Losses from credit derivatives, unlike those from the sudden shock of 2001, have been rolling out since the summer.
Looking for something to blame for the Greek debt crisis, some observers are pointing their fingers at credit derivatives.
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This week, growing problems with other trading strategies in credit derivatives and structured finance also came to a head.
Indeed, they were Masters of the Universe, dominating an obscure credit derivatives market.
He wasn't the only one to sound alarms about the housing bubble and the explosion of the credit derivatives market.
In a choice between balmy Caribbean weather and credit derivatives, it is probably a lot easier to sell the former.
In the credit markets for bonds, loans and credit derivatives, spreads that had been wide began to narrow (see chart).
Hedge funds also buy the potentially toxic waste that banks create when they bundle credit derivatives into so-called synthetic deals.
One of the problems is the lack of clear information, outside the banks and trading floors, about the credit derivatives market.
"Markit has been informed of an investigation by the Department of Justice into credit derivatives and related markets, " says spokeswoman Teresa Chick.
And, he suggests, many banks the main buyers of credit derivatives may have got rid of many of the exposures they no longer want.
Insiders say the biggest exposure may be in the interest-rate swaps market, which is many times larger than those for credit derivatives.
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Credit derivatives have made it easier to separate the credit risk (the danger of default) of bonds from the interest rate risk.
And MBIA will no longer use credit derivatives to guarantee new transactions.
At the moment, derivatives spreads reflect fundamental values more accurately than those in corporate-bond markets, reckons Tim Backshall of Credit Derivatives Research (CDR).
The restrictions also cover the use of credit derivatives to bet on a fall in the value of the debt of a eurozone government.
Assured Guaranty, and the other big monolines like MBIA and Ambac Financial Group, use credit default swaps and other credit derivatives to insure bonds.
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Some hedge funds lost a lot on credit derivatives after the debt of General Motors was downgraded earlier this year, but these troubles were isolated.
Before the monolines ran into trouble with exposure to credit derivatives and structured products in late 2007, they enjoyed a robust business insuring municipal debt.
In recent years, Ambac, MBIA and others have ventured into insuring credit derivatives and other relatively newfangled fixed-income products invented by and peddled by Wall Street.
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