The Role of CDS Market in the Price Discovery Process of the “PIIGS” Countries Sovereign Credit Risk During the Recent Decade of Monetary Easing

The aim of this paper is to analyze the long-lasting dynamic relationship between the credit default swap (CDS) premia and the government bond spreads (GBS), with regard to the sovereign credit risk. The practical focus is to evaluate whether the CDS market effectively is the leading or the lagging market in the credit risk price discovery process during the last decade of monetary easing. The analysis extends to all “sensitive” countries in the Eurozone, the so-called “PIIGS” countries (excluded Greece) for the interval 2007-2017. JEL classification numbers: G01, G12, G14, G20. Keywords: CDS spread, Government bond spread, Sovereign credit risk, Cointegration, Vector error correction model, Granger-causality.

An Analysis of Sovereign Credit Ratings Impact on Financial Development in South Africa

Purpose: The study analyses the effects of sovereign credit ratings on financial development in South Africa. This became important considering that the country has been receiving negative ratings of late. Design/Methodology/Approach: Quarterly data for the period 1994-2017 was analysed using the Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration model and its associated statistics. The Error Correction Model (ECM) was implemented to augment the results of ARDL analysing the short run dynamics. The model was chosen given the order of integration of the variables. Financial development was selected since it influences financial conditions and financial sector stability. Findings: The statistical results revealed that sovereign ratings positively influence financial variables that is in other words higher ratings are found to contribute positively to the growth of the financial development sector. Negative ratings are likely to affect the financial system as due to low access to external funding and exodus of investors, financial development is halted or decreased. Implications/Originality/Value: The results suggest that authorities need to consider the factors which are targeted by rating agencies and ensure that they perform as expected. Governments should focus on raising sovereign ratings and avoiding downgrades to boost financial development.

Measuring Sovereign Credit Risk of the EU countries

European countries have increased significantly their public debt since the Global Financial Crisis. The increasing trend and the high concentration of public debt in portfolios of financial institutions can lead to a financial turmoil we witnessed during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Financial stability authorities therefore look for models to measure the sovereign credit risk and develop“what-if”scenarios to assess a potential repercussion of a financial institution rescue or of an economic contraction on sovereign credit risk. The presented article introduces adjustments to the sovereign contingent claims analysis that is based on the Merton´s Credit Risk Model and the Black-Scholes option pricing techniques. The article proposes adjustments by introducing a new view on a stylised liability side of a central government balance sheet, seniority of its items, and a new proxy for risk measure of junior claims. We show reliable results using derived risk sensitivities for 20 EU countries with decent forward looking ability and propose potential stress-testing framework with an application for the Czech Republic.

Sovereign CDS Premiums’ Reaction to Macroeconomic News: An Empirical Investigation

We assess the efficiency of the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) market by investigating how sovereign CDS spreads react to macroeconomic news announcements. Contrary to the vast majority of the existing literature, one of our main findings supports the hypothesis that news announcements reduce market uncertainty and, thus, that both better- and worse-than-expected news lower CDS prices during our sample period. In addition, we find that CDS spreads respond differently to the four macroindicators across the three different regions. Our findings might help investors in these areas to interpret the surprises of macronews announcements when making decisions in CDS markets.