DTCC RELEASES MORE CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS DATA IN TRANSPARENCY EFFORT

Posted September 2, 2009

NEW YORK – The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has expanded its public release of CDS data maintained in its Trade Information Warehouse to include historical information on those contracts, bringing further transparency to the global credit default swaps (CDS) market.

“Because nearly all credit derivatives transactions are registered and maintained in the Warehouse’s global repository, the industry and regulators worldwide are able to assess from a central vantage point the value and risk exposures of the market, which is essential in times of crisis,” says Stewart Macbeth, Managing Director and Head of the Trade Information Warehouse at DTCC. “Transparency has also been enhanced in the marketplace, as the repository is able to provide the investing public and regulators with a view of the data registered in the Warehouse, which we release publicly on a weekly basis.”

The expanded data release will now show information on the legally binding records from the previous week, month and year, in addition to the data for the current week. The Warehouse historical data will not include information on the more customized trades that were added into the Warehouse in July by major firms involved in CDS trading. Those trades are too customized to be stored in the Warehouse in their full, legal form, like most other CDS data. But basic data on the contracts are available to provide regulators with a better view of the total CDS risk being taken on by key firms.