Goldman's new bubble play for investors: a bet on the next bank crisis

The financial institution is offering trades in derivatives that allow betting against high-risk bank bonds

A trader works at the Goldman Sachs stall on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, New York. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Less than a decade after the last major banking crisis, Goldman Sachs Group and JP Morgan are offering investors a new way to bet on the next one.

The two financial giants are now offering trades in derivatives that enable investors to bet on or against high-risk bank bonds that financial regulators can wipe out if a lender runs into trouble. Others are also planning to start making markets in the contracts, known as total-return swaps, in the coming weeks, according to Max Ruscher, the London-based director of credit indexes at IHS Markit, which administers the benchmarks that the swaps are linked to.

At a time when financial markets are racing from one high to another, and even the new Nobel laureate in economics is wondering aloud about investor behaviour, the development is at once a sign of the headlong global race for investment returns and nagging worries that the investors may be getting ahead of themselves.

Underlying these trades are securities known as additional Tier 1 notes, which banks started issuing after the European debt crisis. They seek to protect taxpayers from bearing the cost of government bailouts, bringing with them relatively high yields. In an era of near-zero interest rates, they’ve become sought after by debt investors around the world, ballooning into a US$150 billion market.

The average yield on the debt is about 4.8 per cent, or around 10 times that for senior bank bonds, based on Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data.

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At least some of the demand for the new derivatives is coming from investors looking to protect themselves should prices of the debt drop - or should another banking crisis erupt. Those risks emerged in June, when AT1s issued by Banco Popular Espanol were wiped out as part of a bank rescue.

“Some participants are looking to get exposure to an asset class while others are hedging their positions,” according to a report on IHS Markit’s website. “On one side of the TRS trade, the index buyer anticipates that the total return of the index will rise. The index seller on the other side takes the opposite view.”

Wall Street and City of London banks have a long track record of creating derivatives around debt markets as investors grow nervous that they're becoming too exposed. Before the financial crisis a decade ago, they created credit-default swaps tied to subprime mortgages, enabling the trade that Michael Lewis made famous in his book The Big Short. Other swaps created around the same time have since become used to bet against commercial mortgages that are heavily exposed to shopping malls.

They are now introducing total-return swaps because AT1 notes cannot be hedged with credit-default swaps. That is because banks can skip coupon payments on the bonds without triggering a default.

The total-return swaps allow investors to hedge a basket of AT1s, and traders can make amplified gains - or potentially outsized losses - without having to own the underlying notes or tie up large amounts of collateral.

Goldman Sachs is making markets in swaps tied to an iBoxx index of dollar-denominated bank-capital notes and a gauge of similar euro bonds, Mr Ruscher said. The two indexes include AT1s issued by lenders such as Banco Santander, Deutsche Bank and HSBC Holdings.

The swaps on bank-capital note indexes “will be a very useful addition to the toolkit that our clients use in managing risk and taking broad-based exposure to the AT1 market,” says Manav Gupta, Goldman’s co-head of European credit flow trading, who confirmed that the bank is making markets for the trades.

A spokesman for JP Morgan confirmed it is also offering swaps on iBoxx indexes. Deutsche Bank started trading total-return swaps referencing Bloomberg Barclays indexes last month and plans to trade on iBoxx gauges.

Total-return swaps are being introduced now because of the growth of the market and investor demand, Mr Ruscher says. In the trade, buyers usually pay sellers the London interbank-offered rate. If the index goes up over the period of the contract, the buyer gets money from the seller; if there’s a decline, the buyer pays an extra sum to the seller. Either way, larger index changes lead to larger payments.