In financial reform aftermath, one thing’s certain: more paperwork and higher hedging costs are coming.
What’s in the new finance rules for you? More costs and more documentation.
No, the news is likely not good for corporate hedgers: costs are going up and corporates with ISDAs governing derivatives across multiple asset classes (e.g., FX and commodities) might find themselves forced to renegotiate ISDAs with some or all their counterparties while also facing increased risk.
Both the House and the Senate are set to vote next week on the finance reform reconciliation bill that was agreed to early Friday morning after an all-nighter filled with incentive dangling and last-minute wrangling. While it will take a while to digest the full impact of the Dodd-Frank bill, as it’s now known, the major provisions for corporate hedgers to consider are the rules on OTC derivatives and the implications of the contentious “Volcker Rule.”
The extra costs
As previously reported, the rules pertaining to derivatives will require exchange-trading and centralized clearing for standardized contracts and reporting of customized derivative contracts to a central repository. The new rules would also impose new capital, margin, reporting, record-keeping and business conduct rules on broker/dealers and other “major swap participants.” Even if many corporate hedgers fall outside of that definition, they will be affected by the margin requirements, either indirectly to compensate banks for their higher capital requirements or directly for transactions that are required to be margined or that the parties agree to margin.
“We’ll need to see how it’s going to settle but it’s definitely going to add a new layer of cost into the system,” said a hedger at a US multinational.
The extra documentation
About the Volcker Rule, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, who brokered the compromise, said: “What can be retained by banks will be interest rate swaps, foreign exchanges, credit derivatives relative to investment grade entities that are cleared, gold and silver and hedging for the bank’s own risk. What would be required to go under the affiliate would be cleared and non-cleared commodities, energies and metals… and all equities and any non-cleared credit default swaps.”
The “affiliate” here would most likely be a separate legal entity that is a non-bank affiliate of the bank. This will most likely result in counterparties having to write new ISDA agreements.
As Marc Horwitz of DLA Piper in Chicago noted, with the “bank push out” of equities, commodity derivatives and some CDS — and not interest rate or FX derivatives – corporate hedgers of commodity risk and equities “may now need separate ISDAs with the bank and its pushed-out affiliate.” This, he added, “would actually increase risk in a bank insolvency since those transactions would not be subject to close-out netting with the affiliate transactions. In addition, [with separate ISDAs] the transactions would be margined separately, resulting in both parties margining in some cases.”