Derivs - People and Markets

The Chicago Board of Education has settled its dispute with Lehman Brothers over whether it has to make payments on an open interest-rate swap, according to documents filed in court yesterday.

Eurex Clearing is working on ways to clear non-standardized over-the-counter equity derivatives once the European Securities and Markets Authority has been established.

Three over-the-counter interest rate traders from Calyon have left the bank in Hong Kong.

Stanley Zau, head of Asia-Pacific emerging markets trading at RBC Capital Markets in Hong Kong, left last week.

Structured credit advisory NewOak Capital has formed a fixed-income trading desk with six staffers from Morristown, N.J., start-up Vesper Capital, which the firm acquired last week. Ron D’Vari, ceo of NewOak in New York, declined to disclose the transaction terms.

Jefferies & Co. is planning to hire four to six senior equity derivatives salespeople in New York this quarter.

The high number of loans eligible for delivery into the credit default swap settlement auction for Aiful is bad news for protection sellers, who may get lumbered with debt they may struggle to get off their books, according to Deutsche Bank credit analysts.

Benoit Labonne, a senior equity derivatives flow salesman at Société Générale in London, has left the firm.

The first step to preventing another financial crisis is increasing the transparency of the over-the-counter derivatives markets, according to a report from research and advisory firm Aite Group.

JPMorgan and Credit Suisse were among the firms unveiling bonuses for 2009 and base salaries for 2010 last week. Headhunters said the feedback they were getting from employees at both was positive, in contrast to Morgan Stanley, where the picture is reportedly more varied.

Goldman Sachs has informed employees that it is raising the base salaries of trading, sales and structuring teams globally by up to 100%, with the majority of senior v.p.’s now likely to be earning around GBP210,000 (USD338,000) compared to GBP80,000-110,000 previously. The firm will pay out the majority of bonuses in cash.

Morgan Stanley has hired Nick Strain from Royal Bank of Scotland to head up the firm’s emerging markets institutional fx sales business in the region, a new role.