Time to Euthanize Sovereign CDSs

Imagine life insurance contracts that wouldn’t pay off if officials declared heart attacks to be “voluntary.” Welcome to the world of sovereign credit default swaps, or CDSs.  When the Greek debt deal was announced on October 27, the eurozone leadership insisted that the banks were taking a 50% write-down “voluntarily,” meaning that Greek CDS contracts would not be triggered.  This was done to protect official creditors like the ECB and IMF, to avoid rewarding speculators, and to prevent possible financial contagion.  In response, Greek CDS prices plunged 20 percentage points.