Central counterparty clearing firms do not cons ute a major source of systemic risk, a new study from the US Treasury shows, but large counterparties that are heavy net sellers of credit default swaps could pose a threat to the financial system, irrespective of the health of the clearinghouse.
A report on contagion in the CDS market by the Office of Financial Research found that CDS counterparties that are not direct members of CCPs, such as hedge funds, asset managers and insurers, pose the biggest risk to financial contagion, despite regulatory efforts to eliminate systemic risk by mandating vanilla contracts into central clearing.
"More attention should be paid to firms that are very large and have highly unbalanced CDS positions, whose failure can trigger large systemic losses even when the CCP does not fail," say the report authors Mark Paddrik, Sriram Rajan, and H Peyton Young.