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Low implied volatility in the FTSE100 over the last few weeks has allowed structurers to offer exceptional investment products.

Panelist laid out their dreams and nightmares for the credit derivatives market over the next 12 months.

Bankers active in China's hottest derivatives instrument, market access products, are anxious over the outcome of regulators' talks about taxing their products.

ING Financial Markets has combined its cash and derivatives credit teams and relocated some of it to Brussels.

IXIS Corporate & Investment Bank has hired David Besançon, an exotic equity derivative structurer at Citigroup in London. Besançon, who joins as head of hybrids and funds, said he will be responsible for beefing up this business at IXIS.

The Singapore branch of Germany's Landesbank Baden-Württemberg has hired Paul Bennet, quantitative consultant at Ernst & Young in Sydney, as a derivatives quantitative analyst for its structured products desk in the Lion City.

A combination of soaring volumes in the synthetic asset-backed securities market and bankers looking to structure deals further down the ratings scale could lead to settlement problems because the documentation is not designed for these types of trades.

Macquarie Bank has set up an equity derivatives desk in the Lion City to tap the growing private banking business and the domestic warrants market.

Professor Avinash Persaud, who shot to fame in the late 1990s by predicting the Russian devaluation crisis four months before it happened, has criticized the credit derivatives market for merely pushing credit risk into the insurance sector, and not actually reducing the level of systemic risk in the financial markets, as its boosters often contend.

Relative-value trades now make up as much as 50% of Deutsche Bank's flows.

A range structure accrues value when a reference index fixes inside a specific range during a pre-defined period.