美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-101:GLOBALIZATION AND REGULATION-4

信贷违约掉期 （英语：credit default swap，缩写CDS）也称贷款违约保险，是信贷与保险的金融衍生工具之一，

是一种可供投资人规避信用风险的契约，

由承受信用风险的一方（买方）与另外一方（卖方）进行交换，在契约期间买方需定期支付一笔固定的费用给卖方（类似权利金的概念），以换取在违约事件（Credit Event）发生时，有权将持有的债券以面额卖给卖方，此债劵面额即为契约的名义本金。

当CDS越高时，代表银行的信用风险越高，买方所受到的风险很高，越有可能之后卖不出去，因此较不愿意用高价买入，使得CDS价格很低。

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As first a bank director (at JPMorgan), and then a bank regulator for eighteen years, I was acutely aware of how much better situated and staffed banks were to understand what other banks and hedge funds were doing as compared with the "by-the-book" regulation done by government financial regulatory agencies. 

As good as some bank examiners are in promoting sound banking practice, they have little chance of uncovering most fraud or embezzlement without the aid of a whistle-blower. 

A major failure of private counterparty surveillance was the near-collapse of Long Term Capital Management, the 1998 financial train wreck described in chapter 9. LTCM's founders, who included two Nobel Prize winners, were held in such awe that they could, and did, refuse to offer collateral to their lenders—a fatal concession on the lenders' part. 

Before long, LTCM ran out of opportunities to earn niche profits, as imitators followed the firm's lead and glutted the market. 

Instead of returning all (not just some) capital to shareholders and declaring their mission complete, LTCM's principals turned into gamblers, making large bets that had little to do with their original business plan. 

In 1998, LTCM lost its shirt. 

The episode shook the market. 

But it's indicative of the development of this sector, and of the financial system generally, that when another notable U.S. hedge fund, Amaranth, collapsed in 2006 with a loss of more than $6 billion, the world's financial system registered scarcely a tremor. 

A recent financial innovation of major importance has been the credit default swap.

The CDS, as it is called, is a derivative that transfers the credit risk, usually of a debt instrument, to a third party, at a price. 

Being able to profit from the loan transaction but transfer credit risk is a boon to banks and other financial intermediaries, which, in order to make an adequate 

rate of return on equity, have to heavily leverage their balance sheets by accepting 

deposit obligations and/or incurring debt. 

Most of the time, such institutions lend money and prosper. 

But in periods of adversity, they typically run into bad-debt problems, which in the past had forced them to sharply curtail lending. 

This in turn undermined economic activity more generally. 

A market vehicle for transferring risk away from these highly leveraged loan originators can be critical for economic stability, especially in a global environment. In response to this need, the CDS was invented and took the market by storm.

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THE AGE OF TURBULENCE 

The Bank for International Settlements tabulated a worldwide notional value of more than $20 trillion equivalent in credit default swaps in mid-2006, up from $6 trillion at the end of 2004. 

The buffering power of these instruments was vividly demonstrated between 1998 and 2001, when CDSs were used to spread the risk of $1 trillion in loans to 

rapidly expanding telecommunications networks. 

Though a large proportion of these ventures defaulted in the tech bust, not a single major lending institution ran into trouble as a consequence. 

The losses were ultimately borne by highly capitalized institutions—insurers, pension funds, and the like—that had been the major suppliers of the credit default protection. 

They were well able to absorb the hit. 

Thus there was no repetition of the cascading defaults of an earlier era. 

Regrettably, every time a hedge fund's problems make the news, political pressure to regulate the industry mounts. 

Hedge funds are both risk takers and very large, the thinking goes—doesn't that prove they are dangerous? 

Shouldn't the government rein them in? 

Leaving aside the undermining of market liquidity that such actions could induce, the benefit of more government regulation eludes me. Hedge funds change their holdings so rapidly that last night's balance sheet is probably of little use by 11 a.m.— 

so regulators would have to scrutinize the funds practically minute by minute. 

Any governmental restrictions on fund investment behavior (that's what regulation does) would curtail the risk taking that is integral to the contributions of hedge funds to the global economy, and especially to the economy of the United States. Why do we wish to inhibit the pollinating bees of Wall Street? 

I say this having served as a regulator myself for eighteen years. 

When I accepted President Reagan's nomination to become chairman of the Fed, 

what drew me was the challenge of applying what I had learned about the economy and monetary policy over nearly four decades. 

Yet I knew that the Federal Reserve was also a major bank regulator and the overseer of America's payments systems. 

Avid defender though I was of letting markets function unencumbered, I knew that as chairman I would also be responsible for the Fed's vast regulatory apparatus. Could I reconcile that duty with my beliefs? 

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GLOBALIZATION AND REGULATION 

In fact; I had crossed that Rubicon long before, during my stint as chairman of President Ford's Council of Economic Advisors. 

Although the primary job of the CEA was to shoot down harebrained fiscal policy schemes, 

I did on occasion accept increased regulation—when it appeared to be the least bad of the options politically available to the administration. 

As Fed chairman, I decided, my personal views on regulation would have to be set 

aside. 

After all, I would take an oath of office that would commit me to uphold the Constitution of the United States and those laws whose enforcement falls under the purview of the Federal Reserve. 

Since I was an outlier in my libertarian opposition to most regulation, I planned to be largely passive in such matters and allow other Federal Reserve governors to take the lead. 

Taking office, I was in for a pleasant surprise. 

I had known from my contact with Fed staff members, during the Ford administration especially, how extraordinarily qualified they were. 

What I had not known about was the staff's free-market orientation, which I now discovered characterized even the Division of Bank Supervision and Regulation. 

(Its chief, Bill Taylor, was a likable, thoroughly professional regulator. President Bush, the father, later appointed him to head the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and his premature death in 1992 was a great blow to his colleagues and the nation.) 

So while the staff recommendations at the Federal Reserve Board were directed to implementing congressional mandates, they were always formulated with a view toward fostering competition and letting markets work. 

There was less emphasis on "thou shalt not" and more on management accountability and disclosure that would enable markets to function 

more effectively. 

The staff also fully recognized the power of counterparty surveillance as the first line of protection against overextended or inappropriate credit. 

This view of regulation was no doubt influenced by the economists in the institution and on the Board. 

They were generally sensitive to the need to buttress the competitive market forces that the financial safety net of the United States tends to impair. 

This safety net—which includes such safeguards as deposit insurance, bank access to the Fed's discount facilities, and access to the Fed's vast electronic payments system—reduces the importance of reputation as a constraint on excessive debt creation. 

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(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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