Derivs - Credit

Naseem Haffar, former head of distressed and loan sales at JPMorgan, has been hired as U.S. head of loan sales and trading at Société Générale as the bank looks to expand its credit, rates and foreign exchange businesses in the U.S.

A key task this year for China’s National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors is the development of better credit risk management tools, said Guanghua Feng, deputy secretary of NAFMII, in a keynote address at Euromoney Seminars’ 7th Annual China Derivatives Summit in Beijing on Thursday.

CME Group is in talks with the founding dealer members of its credit default swaps clearing solution to lift a cap imposed on the volume of CDS it could clear prior to its public launch.

The USD22.1 billion University of Texas Investment Management Company has retained PIMCO for an USD836 million fixed-income mandate, after a review by the UTIMCO board led to a policy change that now requires staffers to control managers’ ability to use derivatives.

Five-year credit default swaps on Dubai sovereign debt pulled in dramatically this morning on the back of government support for the USD23.5 billion restructuring of state-owned Dubai World.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.’s warehouse for credit derivatives data has changed its policy for disseminating information to global regulators by starting to release counterparty information on credit default swaps trading, even without user consent.

Macquarie Group is preparing to launch an emerging markets credit trading desk in London, and has hired two senior traders from Citigroup to lead the charge.

UBS has hired three Deutsche Bank credit traders to work under Anatoly Nakum, head of U.S. investment-grade trading in Stamford, Conn.

The New York insurance committee is circulating within the state assembly a draft bill that would ban naked credit default swaps and require any seller of CDS to obtain a credit default insurance company license.

Brian Buchichio, head of investment-grade credit sales to hedge funds at Royal Bank of Scotland in Stamford, Conn., has left and is expected to join Credit Suisse in May.

The sovereign credit default swap market has been range bound over the last week, a dearth of market-moving events causing a kind of inertia. The Markit SovX Western Europe index, a benchmark for European sovereign credit risk, closed at 68bp on Wednesday, just 2bp wider than the previous week.

China’s National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors (NAFMII) has informed a number of major Chinese banks they will be able to trade renminbi-denominated corporate credit default swaps referencing onshore names as part of a pilot scheme later slated for later this year.