Derivs - People and Markets

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a number of amendments to its financial reform bill tonight, including a controversial proposal that limits banks’ collective stake in any clearing house to 20% and a definition of “major swap participant” that’s better for the industry.

Nomura’s front-office fixed income team in the U.S. is shooting to add 10 more staffers by year-end to take its headcount to 250, according to Jeffrey Michaels and Charles Spero, co-heads of the business in New York.

Florian de Sigy, the former European head of structured equity sales at Deutsche Bank in London, has founded Gamma Finance.

Saurav Sen, a senior consultant at London-based risk advisory firm Calimere Point, has joined UBS as an executive director in fixed income, currencies and commodities structuring.

Calyon has hired Paul Bajer, a structured credit trader from Nomura, as global head of funded credit derivatives trading in London.

Markit plans to launch a synthetic index of prime residential mortgage-backed securities in the first quarter. The index will tentatively be called ABX.PRIME, according to a statement from the company.

Five-year credit default swaps on U.K. sovereign debt gapped out today to their widest levels since June, after Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced in his pre-budget report that the U.K. economy will shrink by 4.75% this year.

Peter Santoro, head of institutional markets at Citadel Securities in New York, left the firm yesterday. The exit came after Patrik Edsparr, the newly promoted ceo of the unit, transferred two executives from the hedge fund side to the investment bank and trading arm.

Svante Horn, a former senior credit salesman at Morgan Stanley, has joined Nomura as a flow credit salesman responsible for Scandinavia.

Market participants appear resigned to the fact the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission is unlikely to budge on a number of contentious plans to overhaul the unlisted structured products market.

Calyon has hired Jeffrey Ferrell as its head of loan syndications sales and trading in the Americas.

A Financial Industry Regulation Authority arbitration panel’s decision to force UBS to compensate an investor to whom the bank sold Lehman Brothers-backed structured products appears on the face of it a troubling development for sellsiders, but some industry officials say they aren’t worried.