CDS

One of the ironclad assumptions in CDS trading was that recovery assumptions, especially on sovereign bonds, would be 40% of par come hell or high water. This key variable, which drives various other downstream implied data points, was never really touched as most i) had never really experienced a freefall sovereign default and ii) 40% recovery on sovereign bonds seemed more than fair. Obviously with Greek bonds already trading in the 20s this assumption was substantially challenged, although the methodology for all intents and purposes remained at 40%. No more - according to CMA, the default recovery on Greece is now 20%. So how long before both this number is adjusted, before recovery assumptions for all sovereigns are adjusted lower, and before all existing risk model have to be scrapped and redone with this new assumption which would impact how trillions in cash is allocated across the board. Of course, none of this will happen - after all what happens in Greece stays in Greece. In fact since America can decouple from the outside world, it now also appears that Greece can decouple from within the Eurozone, even though it has to be in the eurozone for there to be a Eurozone. We may go as suggesting that the word of the year 2012 will be "decoupling", even though as everyone knows, decoupling does not exist: thank you 60 years of globalization, $100 trillion in cross-held debt, and a $1 quadrillion interlinked derivatives framework.

Presented with little comment suffice to ask why the rest of the mortgage-exposed financials would not also be rallying if this move higher in BAC stock was all based on mortgage refi program rumors off of Bernanke's white paper released yesterday and in general because it is an election year and Obama will do anything for a short-term vote grabbing fix? It appears just as likely that there is active arbitrage catch up between BofA's CDS and stock from a notable underperformance in mid-December back to 'fair' now.

Less than a week after a fully failed 3 Year Hungarian bond auction (in which all bids were rejected by the government) sent Hungarian yields surging on December 29, things have gone from bad to worse culminating with today's 1 Year Bill auction which sold just HUF 35 billion ($140 million) in 1 year bills at a staggering 9.96%, a surge of over 2% compared to the yield for the same maturity debt sold just on December 22. To say that this is unsustainable is an understatement. Alas, with the IMF and EU out of the bailout picture following Hungary's refusal to yield to demands to make its central bank a puppet of the state, ironically categorized by Europe as concerns of central bank "independence" it is likely that Hungary will see far more pain in the coming days as the ECB is certainly not going to be buying Hungarian debt - after all it has its hands full already with those other collapsing Eurozone countries. And punctuating the new year comfort are Hungarian CDS levels which just soared to new records over 750 bps. It is only a matter of time before ISDA decrees that any and every Hungarian default event will be fully voluntary thereby collapsing this latest default protection house of cards.

All eyes were on Germany this morning, where up to €5 billion in new 10 Year Bunds would hit the market, with many dreading a repeat of November's failed auction. As it turns out, the auction was a success in relative terms, with the government getting bids of €5.14 billion or more than the desired maximum - something it could not do two months ago. At the end of the day, Germany sold €4.06 billion and the resulting bid/cover ratio of 1.3 was well higher than the failed auction of November which came at  1.1, when a large amount of paper was retained and bids were not enough to cover the amount of paper on offer. Wednesday's auction is still below the average of 1.54 seen at 10-year sales in 2011 and a 19 percent retention rate is also above the 2011 average. In other words, as we suggested, the November failure has nothing to do with the Buba pushing the ECB into auction and everything to do with prevailing rates: the average yield dropped to 1.93 percent from 1.98 percent but the dwindling returns on offer due to the sharp rally in safe-haven assets as the euro zone debt crisis has intensified have led to lower than average demand at recent German auctions. And while the auction was better than expected it was still quite weak, which explains why the EURUSD is trading at overnight lows, back at around 1.2980. Not helping things is Hungary, which had a failed bond auction last week, and whose IMF rescue package is now in tatters. As a result the CDS on the country just hit an all time record 688 bps and moving much wider, while the forint dropped to record lows. As everyone knows if Hungary falls, which is now operating in a bailoutless vacuum, Austria will tumble promptly next. Next, leading to a blow out in Spanish-Bund spreads is a report in Spanish Expansion which said that Spain may request EU, IMF loans to help banks. In other words - this morning's news shows a potential risk reflaring in the European core, periphery and deep periphery which was immune until now. And finally, a UniCredit €7.5 billion new stock issue pricing at a whopping 43% discount to market price shows that fair value of actual demand for European banks is about half of where the artificially propped up price is (recall Europe still has a short selling ban)

Stock futures are up sharply after another week of unprecedented volatility. Although last week was relatively tame, only 13 times in the last 60 years has the S&P 500 had a down 1% day during the week between Christmas and New Year's.  We managed one of those days last week.  We also had a 1% positive day.  Futures are strong and looks like stocks will open above 1272 (where they closed on Jan. 3, 2011). Not only does volatility remain elevated, the stories are about the same. We have some new acronyms to contend with, but ultimately the European Debt Crisis (it is both a bank and sovereign crisis) and the strength of the US economy and China's ability to manage its slowdown are the primary stories. Issues in the Mid-East remain on the fringe but threaten to elevate to something more serious with Iran flexing its muscles more and more. So what to do?  Prepare for more headlines, more risk reversals, and more pain.

Yesterday we charted the combined ECB balance sheet which showed that it had hit an all time record of €2.5 trillion, exclusing today's operation (to the stunned surprise of all those who scream that the ECB should be printing more, more, more). Today, we focus exclusively on the various forms of unsecured liquidity measures, such as today's 3 Year LTRO, because as the following chart from Bank of America shows, European emergency liquidity provisioning post today's liquidity bailout brings the total to €873 billion and is just shy of its all time record of €896 billion, a number which we expect will be taken out as soon as the next liquidity provisioning operation. In other words, European liquidity in euro terms, has virtually never been worse. And as today's additional drawdown of Fed swap lines indicates, the USD liquidity crunch is getting worse not better (confirmed by the rapid deterioration in basis swap levels). Perhaps the fact that not only is nothing fixed, but things are about as bad as they have ever been explains why Europe closed blood red across the board, and also why Bank of America continues to push for an outright crash in all risk (and some were doubting our earlier analysis that BAC is outright yearning for a market crash): To wit from Bank of America's Ralf Preusser: "The tender results do not however change either our longer term  cautious outlook on growth, or the periphery. We remain long 5y CDS protection on France, at 210bp (target 300bp, stop loss 175bp)." So let's see: BAC is shorting the EURUSD, which implies they are pushing for a market drop, and now they want French CDS to soar? Who was it that said the megabanks do not want a crash?

It took about 2 hours for our prediction of the conversion from Deus Ex to Flop Ex Machine to come true. Here are the latest Eurosov 5 Yr  CDS, all whooshing wider in tandem.       

Next week, credit derivatives will roll from December to March maturities. The last couple of days have seen increasing dispersion across sovereign, and corporate equity and credit markets in Europe. The modestly bullish bias to credit index moves, while not totally dismissible as optimism, is likely to have a number of technical drivers implying that investors should not read too much into the compression. Liquidity has dropped notably in both single-name and index products recently and credit derivative dealers have increased the spread between the bid and the offer accordingly - this means the roll adjustment may be even more expensive this time around and for traders with a book full of single-name CDS, positioned more short, the bias will be to sell index protection to 'hedge' some of that roll-adjustment. The other technical is the indices swung once again from rich to cheap into the middle of this week (meaning the indices trade on a cheap basis to the cost of the underlying components) and so heading into a roll, arbitrageurs will want to rapidly take advantage of this - especially in the high-beta XOver and Subordinated financials space. So, all-in-all there has been some optimism in credit markets the last two days but as-ever we pour some sold water on the excitement as all-too-likely this is driven by roll and arb technicals, as opposed to a wall of risk-hungry buyers.

For anyone wondering why CDS pricing shifts to a points upfront methodology from running spread once said spread passes 1000 or so bps, look no further than the Greek 5 year today, where the 5 Year CDS is shown with a mid-price of 10,115 bps, being offered at 10,418. Now if there was a one to one equivalency on the CDS and bond curve, this would imply a bond price in cash terms that is negative. And since this would be quite impossible to be achieved, even for Greece, this is a perfect example of why spread in CDS terms becomes promptly irrelevant due to the shapeshift in the default curve past the 16% or so discount from par threshold. And while in practice this means that CDS could in theory go up without an upside limit, for all intents and purposes this is irrelevant as the DV01 in the 100% range approaches zero.

As much as we hate to say it, Europe is now without a shadow of a doubt the new AIG, only this time such heretofore considered insane (in retrospect) activities as doubling down to infinity on ones TBTF status are out in the public record for all to see. At least AIG conducted Joe Cassano's "made in London" $2.7 trillion bet on home prices never dropping in the shadows of Curzon 1. Whereas two days ago we made it  clear how the unwind of trillions in rehypothecated securities could be the avalanche that buries first Europe and then the world, we explicitly excluded the impact of synthetic products such as CDS. Now it is time to bring the picture full circle, and put CDS front and center. As Bloomberg reports, "BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest bank, sold a net 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion) of credit- default swaps on the nation’s sovereign debt, according to data compiled by the European Banking Authority. UniCredit SpA, Italy’s biggest lender, and Banca Monte dei Paschi SpA are net insurers of more than 500 million euros each of their government’s bonds, and Oesterreichische Volksbanken AG, the Austrian lender which has yet to pay interest on 1 billion euros of state aid received in 2009, has guaranteed a net 839 million euros of its national debt, EBA data show." (EBA source - link). For those confused by the above, here is the explanation: European banks, in order to generate modest cash flow from collecting on the pariodic interest premiums owed to them in order to plug increasingly large capital shortfall holes that otherwise would simply keep growing ever larger, have sold and continue to sell massive amounts of default protection on their very own host countries! As a reminder, it was precisely this that destroyed AIG when the illusion of the credit bubble burst.

What Mario Draghi did today is the worst of all possible worlds: on one hand he is allowing more financial risk-taking on the ECB's dime courtesy of increased liquidity and relaxed collateral requirements as well as longer LTROs, on the other he essentially killed any provisional bailout rumors, saying that the ECB will not monetize, nor lend to the IMF. The result: sovereign risk is soaring, as seen by this CDS update.

Misquoting Shakespeare before the market open may seem like blasphemy but in a follow-up confirmation of a thesis we proposed back in July, Luxor Capital expands on the idea that something rotten is ahead for the state of Denmark. As with many of these crises, the heart of the Danish problems lie in a commercial and residential real estate boom and looming bust and with the capital/equity remaining so low in the Danish banking system (and a pitiful funding profile), it seems increasingly evident that public balance sheet support will become necessary (and perhaps not sufficient). How ironic that we pointed out, back in July, the probability that Germany will need two insolvency funds, a South-facing and now a North-facing one. Having traded in the mid 20s during H1 2011, CDS now stands at 106bps (off its September peak of 158bps) and given the interest we are seeing from hedge funds in this relatively lower cost short, we suspect this week's modest decompression will accelerate.

While it hardly comes as a surprise, Bloomberg last night reported that Italian banks are the culprits. The Top 5 Italian banks (which comprise 90% of the country's derivatives market) increased their net sold protection by an amazing 41% to the end of June, now standing at $24bn. Of course, there is no evidence of them selling protection on one another in a quid-pro-quo sense (a la Greece), but it seems the creation of carry out of thin air remains alive and well and given that every credit in the world is significantly wider no than it was on average through the first half of the year, we hesitate to guess at the MtM losses their trading desks are sitting on. What is even more incredible, and a topic we have covered vociferously, is the 13% rise in notional derivative amounts. We know full well, from every liquidity indicator, that USD funding is hard to come by for European banks which just makes us wonder, given the USD-denomination of European Sovereign CDS, how much easier it is to sell protection and gather USD cashflows, than to swap your EUR or stigmatize yourself with the ECB or Fed swap lines?

UPDATE: BofA +37.5bps to 480bps - record wides.

As financial equities are underperforming so we are also seeing the major US banks widening in CDS land - closer and closer to record wides in the case of BofA (with 20bps of its Oct11 intraday wides) and GS (beyond Oct11 wides but below 2008/9 wides). Their credit curves are also inverting further as equity catches up to recent weakness in credit which has seen almost constant derisking since the start of November.

Continuing our coverage of our favorite European implosion derivative trade for entities which, unlike countries, are not too big to fail, namely Italian and German mega insurers loaded to the gills with Italian and other Euro sovereign debt, Generali (ASSGEN) and Pimco parent Allianz (ALZ), we find that their CDS continue to implode (or soar as the case may be), more or less as expected. We anticipate that more and more traders will proceed to switch basis trade hedges not with sovereigns (where the CDS is now clearly defunct) but with sovereign derivatives such as insurers which can certainly fail (at least for the time being). In the meantime, below is a refresh on how ASSGEN and ALZ has done since we suggested buying protection in the two companies.