Streetwise Professor

Risk Magazine’s annual review issue includes a set of short contributions on the progress that has been made on the G-20 OTC derivative reforms.  (If you run into paywall problems: there are ways.  There are ways.)  The contribution by yours truly is under the category Academics (plural) even though I am the only academic in the piece.  I guess I count for double, or something.
But that’s not the best part.  The best part is the headline:

Progress and peril: Davie, Dodd, Maijoor, Pirrong and more on the G-20 reforms.

Sharing top billing with Chris Dodd!  What is the world coming to?  I guess it could be better (or worse): it could have been Barney.  Or Gary.  Or Bart.

To spare you having to scroll through all of the contributions by politicians, lawyers and people who actually work in these markets, here’s my two cents:

When the Dodd-Frank Act was passed, I thought the Sef mandate was its worst part. It has nothing to do with the act’s ostensible purpose – reducing systemic risk – and imposes a one-size-fits-all model for trading swaps that will likely decrease the efficiency of the market. The made-available-for-trade provision of the Sef rule merits the title ‘worst of the worst’. This says if a Sef applies to the CFTC to trade a particular type of swap, and it approves the application, all trading of that type of swap must occur on a Sef. This turns the ordinary competitive process on its head. In most markets, a firm introduces new products, and if it is desirable to consumers, it sells. If the product is flawed, it doesn’t. Under this rule, a firm that introduces a flawed execution method imposes this bad choice on all consumers.

The CFTC could prevent such a perverse outcome by not approving an application. However, the agency’s animus to the traditional dealer-centric trading model and its fetish for transparency means the CFTC sets very low standards for approval. It also demonstrates the CFTC’s bizarre interpretation of cost-benefit analysis: it considers only the trivial cost of filing an application, and totally ignores the massive costs that would result if traders are forced to execute in an inefficient way.

Swap market participants and transactions are diverse. There is no execution model to fit all – counterparties themselves are best placed to determine how to execute their trades. Sef mandates already constrain choice, and made-available-for-trade puts the execution decision in the hands of third parties whose interests are not aligned with those actually trading. Given the size of these markets, if the untried Sefs don’t work as hoped – even for a modest subset of traders – the dislocations and inefficiencies will be immense.

The Risk editors chopped my last line, which was: “I fear that the epitaph of the OTC swap market will be: ‘Died of a Theory.'”  (A line lifted from Jefferson Davis’s epitaph on the Confederacy.)  The Theory, of course, is that traditional means of executing OTC derivatives trades are flawed, if not evil, and that Gary Knows Best in imposing a simulacrum of a centralized, order driven market that has worked well for futures on swaps, which are different in many ways.