It's Not Just Banks That Are Too Big To Fail

"Following the financial crisis, worries about failures in over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives trading causing destabilizing runs and market crashes have led regulators to force most OTC trades to be cleared through central counterparties (CCPs). CCPs act like clearing banks, taking on their own books the risk of the seller defaulting. Sellers clearing OTC trades through a CCP can (in theory) default on payment without risking the entire system unravelling.

But this creates a problem. What happens if a CCP fails? Of course, the way CCP-cleared OTC trades are structured should minimize this risk. CCPs require sellers to post initial margin in the form of cash or government bonds to cover expected volatility during the lifetime of the trade, and they also require posting of variation margin in cash to cover daily price movements. As everything is fully margined in liquid safe assets, there should in theory be no shortfalls and no defaults.

But…..cash margin requirements don’t necessarily make the system safer. Firms with largely illiquid balance sheets, such as large insurance companies, can have difficulty raising the cash to meet large increases in variation margin. The principal cause of the failure of AIG in 2008 was cash margin calls on OTC credit default swaps that it was unable to meet. And this brings me back to the question – what happens if a CCP fails?"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2014/04/30/its-not-just-banks-that-are-too-big-to-fail/

Sovereign precariousness

"Bond spreads, along with their close cousin credit default swaps, are a beautifully linear measure of sovereign default risk. They go up in a straight and steady line: the higher the number, the riskier the country is perceived to be. And so they’re normally the first and last place that people look when they’re interested in the chances of any given country defaulting.

But of course the world isn’t quite as simple as that, and — as we have learned the hard way — it’s the unexpected defaults which are the most damaging. (...)

What we did was to take a country’s primary deficit — the amount it needs to borrow every year to finance its operations — and add on its total annual debt service. We then took that number and divided it into the country’s total foreign reserves, to get an idea for the length of time that sovereign reserves would be able to fund not only operations, but also all of the country’s debt service requirements.

The results are quite startling.(...) Japan would have only about 14 days."

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/02/chart-of-the-day-sovereign-precariousness-edition/