The empirical relationship between the spreads of Credit Default Swaps and Bonds

Scientific Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, language: English, abstract: Warren Buffet, the worlds richest man, once said that derivatives are financial "weapons of mass destruction." a term popularized by George W. Bush to describe nuclear arms. Indeed financial derivatives have a far greater impact on the market than their underlying due to their leverage effect. And the most popular and important credit derivatives nowadays are credit default swaps with a current notional value of over 60 trillion US dollars according to ISDA 1 (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) and 58 trillion US dollars according to BIS 2 (Bank for international settlement) respectively. That is more than the whole worlds gross domestic product in the same year! 3 This paper examines the empirical relationship of CDS premium and credit spread by testing on their theoretical equivalence derived by Duffie (1999). It begins with an overview of CDS followed by the theoretical framework. The analysis starts with explanation of testing methods and description of data. After confirming the existence of the basis spread, this paper goes on to analyse the interactions of CDS spread and Bond spread using econometrics methods like Cointegration and Granger Causality tests. Also examined is the leadership of price discovery process between CDS market and traditional bond market.