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They are famous for being loaded with lots CDOs.... single name CDS.... personally I don't think so. But I could be wrong that point. In anycase, what's the point for AIG to unwind their CDS book at this point if they have one.

Your analogy with GSE is exactly right - except in this case it's synthetic issuances. It's the exact, corporate form of mortgage securitization (although lending standards were obviously nowhere nearly as bad). Sarbox was just something that happened around the same time.

I'm going to put aside the terminology issue. You are right that there are two sides. What you are missing is what pushed spreads to all time (and very unreasonable in retrospect) tights in 2006: synthetic CDO issuances. Massive amount of those papers will issued to investors and to create them...

1) Did sarbox have an impact on the growing market? (postulation) No. The CDS market's initial growth predates serb-ox and is a consequence of removing risk from bank's trading books to increase capacity. Serb-ox applies mostly to non-finance firms as standard financial intermediaries and...

That's still wrong. long contract == long risk because a long in CDS world means selling protection. This convention has been established since the dawn of CDS trading - and of course it's arbitrary, but then so is the term bull and bear. Look - if you want to present your analysis of a...

If you are long a contract (which means you sold protection and are long premium - meaning getting the income) and the contract went from 100bps to 1000bps, you are crushed... you now owe your counterparty 900bps x DV01 (say, around 3 for a then 5Y contract). So you are out 27%.... nice bull...

Depends. On index, typical trades are 5MM+ though you won't get turned down for doing 1MM+ (it used to be that on some really super senior tranche stuff it's 1 billion+ in size) On single name CDS, 1-2MM is about typical these days. But that really varies a lot depending on the entity.

First - it's a bear market, not a bull market in CDS - spreads go up, prices go down, it's a bear (I trade CDS for an institution - and for the most part it isn't called a bull or bear). Second - you can't. Even if you had the money, it'll take lots and lots of cash to arrange an ISDA with...

Inflation is one enemy of growth, not the only enemy of growth.

As someone from the perspective of those who have the infrastructure to capture those information - of course not. It's there - go find it. The law should not, I think, require the equalization of all profit opportunities. As you say, none of it is proprietary information. So what's the need...

Our analyst (I work for a large buy side institution) called by the CFO and asked. The CFO didn't answer, so he called up the banks and asked them. Since we trade a lot of stuff with the banks, they clarified it for us. Now, none of the information the bank gave us were inside information - just...

Thanks for that buddy. But if GAAP goes with cash accounting rather than accrual, the usual problems with mark to market and everything will look MUCH MUCH worse? think about it, mark-to-market is an accrual accounting principal, not a cash account principal....

Are you sure that works for bloomberg? Bloomberg screens are pretty funky stuff - certainly not standard windows controls.

Urr..... LIBOR spread is 100bps over treasury now. Was around 80bps last week. Hardly doubled - and the spread is the important risk indicator, not rate.

And just to respond to your points in parts, I don't think you know what GAAP is.

So what the hell do you want? Having the regulatory right to call up the CFO and have him answer any question you damn well please? There has to be a balance between being as detailed in disclosure as possible and putting too much burden on the filers or disclose sensitive business...

Like to see you cite some (or any) evidence for this. Aspiring (by this I assume the poster means junior) traders tend not to have rights to authorize their own trades. Besides, and this is most oft missed point on ET, institutions are not organized very differently.

"IMO" - what exactly qualifies your opinion? This set of changes has been in the works since 2003 and will not fully take place for another 5 years. Note that US accounting standards aren't exactly stable - major revisions happen ever few years and minor changes almost every year. Accountants...

um... how about the actual rules themselves... for example, IFRS rules disallowed the pooling method of merger accounting before US rules. I'm not an accountant - but I do recall the IFRS treatment of securities classification (whether they are held to maturity and no marked to market) is more...

Where in the world is this coming from? Harmonizing to an international standards used by most of the 1st world countries means LESS choice for accounting games.