Rehypothecation is the practice where a derivatives dealer reuses collateral posted from its end user in over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets. Although rehypothecation benefits the end user through cost reduction of derivative trades, it also creates additional counterparty credit risk since the end user may not receive the collateral back when the dealer suddenly defaults. To evaluate the benefits and risks of rehypothecation, we propose a derivative pricing framework with bilateral counterparty credit risk that determines the amount of rehypothecable collateral. We also model the realistic features of derivative trades: two different types of collateral, the time delay of collateral posting and the rating-dependent collateral agreement. We apply our pricing framework to cross currency swaps and investigate the impact of rehypothecation on the swap spreads.

This paper investigates when and how the US dollar shortages evolved into the full crisis in the cross-currency swap market between major European currencies and the US dollar during the turmoil of 2007–2009, using the dynamic factor model with regime-switching β coefficients of each swap price with respect to the latent common factor. The 1-year market entered the high-β crisis regime soon after the onset of the subprime problem in August 2007. The 10-year market entered that regime following the collapse of Bear Sterns in mid-March 2008. Financial credit spreads have significant predictive power for switches between high and low-β regimes.