New Derivatives Data

The OCC released its Q3 report on trading and derivatives activity today. There appears to be minimal data on Morgan Stanley, and no data on Goldman Sachs, the two newest bank holding companies. That's only fair, I guess, since MS and GS only became bank holding companies in the very last days of Q3.

The highlights from the Q3 data, while admittedly incomplete and already dated, seem to confirm what we already knew: JPMorgan was (and still is) the biggest player, by far, in the CDS market. JPMorgan's notional CDS topped $9 trillion (table 1), though at least according to this data, JPM was still a net CDS buyer (table 12). The OCC data suggest that BofA and HSBC were both net CDS sellers. JPM's current credit exposure came in at $163 billion as of Sept. 30, which was up about $20 billion from the end of Q2. This is much less than I expected, since the Q3 numbers for JPM take into account its takeover of Bear Stearns, which the Q2 numbers did not.

The press release is here; the full report is here.