Deutsche Bank AG, the lender exiting some trading operations, is in talks with JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. to sell the last batches of about 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) in complex financial instruments, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Deutsche Bank, based in Frankfurt, has sold about two-thirds of the portfolio of uncleared, mostly single-name credit default swaps since last year and wants to sell the rest within the next few months, according to the people, who asked not to be identified as the talks are private. The three U.S. banks have already purchased some of the instruments, the people said.
Deutsche Bank is withdrawing from countries, dumping unprofitable clients and pulling out of businesses as co-Chief Executive Officer John Cryan, 55, tries to boost profit and meet tougher capital rules after starting in July. He inherited a plan by his predecessor, Anshu Jain, to stop trading most credit default swaps tied to individual companies after new banking regulations made them costlier.
Shedding Risk
Before Deutsche Bank began the sales, the swaps had a leverage exposure -- a metric that regulators use to measure a bank's capital requirement -- of about 100 billion euros under the latest rules, one of the people said. The lender said in April that it would shrink the leverage exposure of its investment banking and trading unit by as much as 150 billion euros through 2018.
Credit-default swaps are insurance contracts that pay out if a borrower defaults on a debt. Investors use them to speculate on the borrower's ability to repay debt or to guard against losses on the debt. The instruments helped to fuel the 2008 credit crunch and regulators have been trying to make them safer and less opaque.
...The swaps are mostly "single-name," meaning that they're tied to individual companies' creditworthiness, as opposed to an index of securities, one of the people said. Deutsche Bank stopped trading these instruments in late 2014, the lender said then. The total size of the credit derivatives market has dropped by almost two-thirds from $33 trillion in 2008, according to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
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