Basle BIS worried

The Basle Bank for International Settlements, the supervisory organization of the world’s major central banks is alarmed at the dangers. The Joint Forum of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, an international group of banking, insurance and securities regulators, wrote in April that the trillions of dollars in swaps traded by hedge funds pose a threat to financial markets around the world.
``It is difficult to develop a clear picture of which institutions are the ultimate holders of some of the credit risk transferred,'' the report said. ``It can be difficult even to quantify the amount of risk that has been transferred.''
Counterparty risk can become complicated in a hurry. In a typical CDS deal, a hedge fund will sell protection to a bank, which will then resell the same protection to another bank, and such dealing will continue, sometimes in a circle. That has created a huge concentration of risk. As one leading derivatives trader expressed the process, “The risk keeps spinning around and around in this daisy chain like a vortex. There are only six to 10 dealers who sit in the middle of all this. I don't think the regulators have the information that they need to work that out.''
Traders, and even the banks that serve as dealers, don't always know exactly what is covered by a credit-default-swap contract. There are numerous types of CDSs, some far more complex than others. More than half of all CDSs cover indexes of companies and debt securities, such as asset-backed securities, the Basel committee says. The rest include coverage of a single company's debt or collateralized debt obligations...
Banks usually send hedge funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors e-mails throughout the day with bid and offer prices, as there is no regulated exchange to pricess the market or to insure against loss. To find the price of a swap on Ford Motor Co. debt, for example, even sophisticated investors might have to search through all of their daily e-mails.