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Credit-default swap spreads on Lufthansa and Air France tightened last week despite expectations that names in the airline industry would be hit by investors' concerns over the SARS virus. Traders said five-year mid-market protection on Lufthansa contracted to 145 basis points from 175bps, while Air France moved in to 145bps from 165bps. Traders chalked up the tightening entirely to investment banks buying protection on names for a pipeline of structured credit products, including first-to-default baskets and collateralized debt obligations.

The pricing of structured finance instruments is a major issue in risk management and the more complicated the instruments the more important advanced numerical pricing schemes become. In this article, we concentrate on schemes for financial models which lead to partial differential equations. This covers a wide range of models, such as Black-Scholes, certain models of stochastic volatility and the wide range of one or more factor short-rate models, such as Hull-White and Black-Karasinski. Green´s Functions & Adaptive Integration

Jim Finkel, former managing director in Deutsche Bank's global CDO group in London, is pounding the pavement for capital to launch a structured credit hedge fund. Former colleagues said Finkel is likely to team up with a trader as his expertise is in structuring. Finkel is a veteran of the CDO market, having also held roles in structuring and sales at Bear Stearns, but has not held senior risk taking roles, according to associates. Unless he teams up with well-renowned traders this could hinder his search for capital, noted rival CDO professionals.

Bear Stearns has hired Thomas Feda, executive director and marketer in UBS Warburg's cross rates group in Stanford, Conn., as a managing director and derivatives marketer for institutional clients in New York. Peter Croncota, senior managing director, to whom Feda reports, said the hire was made in response to growth in the firm's business and is a newly created seat. Feda declined comment.

CIBC World Markets is likely to merge its cash and synthetic collateralized debt obligation operations, following the loss of a 21-strong cash securitization team to CDC IXIS Capital Markets North America last month. David Allan, managing director, head of the Canadian securitization group and head of global synthetic credit structuring in Toronto, explained that for the past few years CIBC has upheld an increasingly artificial distinction between its cash and synthetic structuring operations by running two distinct groups. Following the departure of the New York-based cash staffers, including the groupÕs head Ken Wormser, CIBC is now reviewing its organization, with a likely outcome being the merger, he said.

Kenneth Farrar, managing director in the fixed income capital markets group at Citigroup Global Markets, has moved to AIG Financial Products in Westport, Conn. Farrar specialized in the technology, media and telecom sectors, and his brief included derivatives, according to a market official.

Veritas DGC, a gatherer of seismic data, has entered an interest rate swap to convert around USD80 million of a recent USD195 million floating-rate note sale into a fixed-rate liability. Matthew Fitzgerald, cfo in Houston, said the firm only hedged part of the total issue into a fixed-rate, paying 1.85% and receiving LIBOR, in order to maintain its fixed-to-floating debt mix. The swap has a two-year maturity, compared with the four-year issue of the note, in case Veritas seeks to buy back the debt early and refinance the issue, he said. Deutsche Bank was the lead manager and Wells Fargo Bank executed the swap, said Fitzgerald. Veritas sought quotes from both firms and settled with Wells Fargo, with whom it has a long-term relationship, after getting slightly better bids, according to Fitzgerald.

The Council of Europe Development Bank has entered a cross-currency interest rate swap to convert a recent fixed-rate USD500 million bond offering into a synthetic euro-denominated floating-rate liability. Arturo Seco, deputy funding manager in Paris, said the company always converts dollar-denominated debt into euros--its funding currency--and also maintains a floating-rate debt portfolio.

Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are pitching opposing trades based on recent falls in European equity volatility. JPMorgan is expecting single-name vol will continue to fall, but Goldman is predicting a rebound. Aldous Birchall, research analyst in quantitative relative value research at JPMorgan in London, said the firm is recommending investors sell volatility on single name stocks, while buying credit protection. Implied volatility typically falls as credit spreads tighten, Birchall explained, but volatility is currently lagging the comparable move in credit spreads.

One-month euro/dollar option volatility spiked to 9.7% last Wednesday up from 8.9% the previous week. The jump was largely influenced by movements in the spot market with volatility increasing as spot approached USD1.1, where several options players hold short positions, according to a trader in New York. Spot traded at USD1.096 Wednesday afternoon up from USD1.083 the week before.

Market participants are becoming increasingly impatient as they await the much-delayed release of guidelines on the Chinese derivatives market. "Many people were too optimistic last year. It's been a slow process," said a trader at a bulge bracket house in Hong Kong. Guidelines for non-renminbi derivatives were widely expected to be released by last December (DW, 9/1) but the process has been held up, explained Li Fu An, deputy director general at the People's Bank of China in Beijing. "It's been slowed down by the recent [Chinese leadership] transitions," said Li. A new entity, dubbed the Regulatory Commission of Banking Industry, will be set up in the coming weeks to handle such issues as the guidelines. "This is one of the most important issues the new institution will handle once it's established," added Li. He declined to comment on a likely timeframe for the release.

Credit derivatives volumes in Japan have dropped by 30-40% year-on-year and there seems little chance of an immediate pick up, bucking a global trend of huge growth in the derivatives markets' hottest product. The rest of Asia was recording a jump in trades before the SARS virus cut volumes across all products.