Credit Derivatives: An Overview
概述了信用衍生品从对冲信用风险到成为主要投资工具的发展，重点介绍信用违约互换、指数交易及市场面临的挑战，适合想了解信用衍生品基础与演变的读者。
Credit derivatives arose from the demand by financial institutions to hedge and diversify credit risk, but they have now become a major investment tool as well. Almost all credit derivatives take the form of the credit default swap, which transfers the default risk of one or more corporations or sovereign entities from one party to the other. Up until 2004, the majority of credit default swaps were written on single names, but after the introduction of widely accepted credit indices in 2004 the major impetus to growth and market liquidity has been credit default swaps on indices. The major challenges facing credit derivatives in their first years of existence were resolving ambiguities in reference entities and in definitions of credit events. Since the introduction of index trading and the widespread entry of hedge funds, the major challenges have been in settlement after credit events and in addressing operational backlogs that resulted from increasing numbers of novations. Now that hedge funds are an established part of the market, the next issue of interest is likely to be whether credit derivatives activity will move to exchanges. 3 A derivative is a bilateral agreement that shifts risk from one party to another; its value is