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The aim of this paper is to discuss the business and operational considerations and controls involved when derivatives, specifically swap contracts, are used as investment vehicles. Overall, the paper attempts to provide the baseline for understanding swap processing requirements and guidance to professionals who have compliance and oversight responsibility for these investment products.

The approach focuses on the core understanding of the swap investment vehicle and the procedures, controls, and operating environment required to process them correctly.

Historically, firms have addressed the procedures and controls surrounding swap investment vehicles as a reaction to processing errors. Financial services companies and their service providers need to proactively review their portfolios, procedures, and controls in an effort to mitigate and manage the risks associated with the processing of swap contracts.

Based on first‐hand experience working at and/or with asset managers and service providers, the paper has endeavored to present current and thought provoking information for management consideration on this hot‐button issue.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the rule recently published by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission that establishes a timetable for the mandatory clearing of interest rate and credit default swaps through a clearinghouse.

The paper discusses the structure of cleared trades in swaps, the classes of interest rate and credit default swaps that are subject to mandatory clearing under the CFTC's new rule and the affirmative and negative specifications for each class, the phased approach adopted by the CFTC for the mandatory clearing compliance schedule, and the end‐user and inter‐affiliate exemptions from the mandatory clearing requirement.

“Centralized clearing,” a process in which bilaterally negotiated trades of derivatives have to be given up to a centralized clearinghouse, is a cornerstone of the new global regulatory system for derivatives. Its proponents argue that centralized clearing will help to mitigate systemic risk by helping counterparties identify and net positions. The paper outlines the clearing rules in the USA for interest rate and credit default swaps.

The paper provides expert guidance from experienced financial services lawyers.

Liquidity risk, i.e., the likelihood that a swap can be “sold” (i.e., assigned) may affect swap prices. This article addresses the importance of liquidity risk as a factor in the valuation of swaps, which are subject to default risk. The author presents a model for pricing these swaps by incorporating a proxy for liquidity risk. Using the model, the author finds that the effects of liquidity risk may partially offset the effects of default risk.

The aim of the paper is to explain the joint final rules adopted on April 18, 2012 by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) further defining the major categories of swap and security‐based swap market participants, “swap dealer“, “security‐based swap dealer”, “major swap participant”, “major security‐based swap participant” and “eligible contract participant” and to explain the process of evaluating a party's status under the rules.

The paper provides the statutory definition of a dealer, and explains the CFTC's and the SEC's interpretive guidance, including four tests and a discussion of the CFTC and SEC dealer trader distinctions, swaps not considered in determining dealer status, and a de minimis exception. It provides the statutory definition of a major participant, along with the four major categories of swaps and an explanation of the “substantial position”, “substantial counterparty exposure” and “highly leveraged” criteria, along with the exclusion of positions held for hedging or mitigating commercial risk from the substantial position analysis. A Dodd‐Frank amended definition of an eligible contract participant (ECP) along with the final ECP rules is provided.

All swap market participants will need to know whether they qualify as one of these entities because each type of entity figures prominently in the new swap market requirements imposed by the Dodd‐Frank Act.

The paper provides practical guidance from experienced financial services lawyers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore swap-shops, which emerged as part of the collaborative consumption phenomenon, by investigating what the implications are of consumers acting as suppliers and how this affects supply chain management within the context of the fashion industry.

This study explores the collaborative consumption phenomenon through swap-shops in three countries: the UK, Finland and Germany. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with swappers, non-swappers and organisers. To further enhance the data set six observations of swap-shop events were conducted. Data were transcribed and analysed using multiple coding cycles and using a grounded research approach.

Findings indicate that consumers were most concerned with availability/sizing and quality of garments, whilst organisers felt uncertainty was the biggest issue. Data allowed creating a framework that blueprints the swapping supply chain, in which consumers emerge as suppliers. It highlights possible activities in different cycles, whilst furthermore indicates that consumption cycles can move from monetary (e.g. selling) to non-monetary transactions (e.g. swapping) and vice versa.

Swapping as a relatively new fashion supply mode implies a fluidity of market roles. Disruptive business models can blur boundaries between the supply- and demand-side. This indicates that consumers can change “roles” multiple times as they go through the consumption cycle.

The authors extended the knowledge on swapping by describing how this phenomenon can activate consumers, and extend and intensify the use of garments and therefore swapping can slow the material throughput in the system. It is the first paper to focus solely on swapping within a three country context.

The esoteric area of financial derivatives has become quite salient in light of the financial crisis of the last few years. In the public sector, state and local governments have increasingly employed derivatives in their bond financings. This paper analyzes state and local governments’ use of a specific type of municipal derivative instrument (a floating-to-fixed interest rate swap) in a specific type of transaction (bond refinancing). The paper provides a case study of an executed bond refinancing transaction that employed a floating-to-fixed interest rate swap quantifying the substantial long-term costs financial derivatives can impart on state and local governments. The paper concludes with some specific lessons learned about debt-related derivative usage for public financial managers and offers some suggestions for further empirical and theoretical research in this area of public financial management.

This paper empirically shows that the long-term persistence of negative swap spreads, which was unique phenomenon only in Korean interest rate swap market, could be caused by the covered interest rate arbitrage trading by foreign investors in Korean market. It concretely shows the fixed rates of currency swap, whose decreases expand the incentive for arbitrage trading by foreign investors, to positively influence the interest rate swap spreads. The empirical results suggests that the foreign factors might make more effect on the interest rate swap market than the spot bond market, resulting in the negative interest rate swap spreads. The results implies that, the asset pricing for interest rate swap needs to consider the foreign factors under the circumstances of open capital market.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the consequences of the “safe harbor” provisions of the US Bankruptcy Code that were enacted from 1984 through 2005 and that protect certain financial contracts from standard bankruptcy procedures.

Qualitative methods are used to evaluate whether these provisions of the Bankruptcy Code were successful in their stated goal of reducing systemic risk in the financial system. A model of systemic risk is presented verbally in order to frame the discussion.

Recent evidence indicates that the “safe harbor” provisions, in fact, destabilized the financial system by encouraging collateralized interbank lending, discouraging careful analysis of the credit risk of counterparties and increasing the risk that creditors will run on a financial firm.

This paper indicates that the rewriting of the Bankruptcy Code to favor financial firms has had a profoundly destabilizing effect on the financial system. To put the financial system on more secure foundations, the author proposes that large complex financial institutions be prohibited from posting collateral on over the counter derivative transactions and that the repo‐related bankruptcy amendments passed in 2005 be repealed.

This paper proposes an original framework for understanding systemic risk which drives the results in the paper.

Debt-related financial derivative usage by state and local governments became a very salient topic over the last few years in light of the Great Recession and its impacts on the efficacy of these financial instruments. However, there has been a dearth of systematic research on the types and kinds of derivatives state and local governments have actually employed in recent years. While anecdotes of financial derivative usage has grabbed the headlines (such as the case of Jefferson County, Alabama), there has been little research examining the derivative portfolios among states or local governments pre- and post-Great Recession. Using descriptive research, this paper attempts to rectify this gap in the literature for state governments as a means of better understanding how the recent financial crisis has impacted the critical debt management decision to use financial derivatives.

The swaps market has been the world’s fastest growing financial market in the last few decades and the literature has sought reasons to explain this rapid growth. This study addresses this issue from a UK perspective and seeks to find out which UK organizations participate in the swaps market, why they choose to use it and the problems that they have encountered. The study consisted of a survey of the treasurers of 594 organizations in the UK. The most important reason why UK companies used swaps was to match their asset and liability cash flows and to stabilize their bottom line earnings. The results of this research will be of interest to both academics and to financial managers worldwide.