Profit from Interest Rate Swaps

Financial Benefits Created By Interest Rate Swap Transactions

Consider the following statements:

(a) A company with the highest credit rating, AAA, will pay less to raise funds under identical terms and conditions than a less creditworthy company with a lower rating, say BBB.

The incremental borrowing premium paid by a BBB company, which it will be convenient to refer to as a "credit quality spread", is greater in relation to fixed interest rate borrowings than it is for floating rate borrowings and this spread increases with maturity.

(b) The counterparty making fixed rate payments in a swap is predominantly the less creditworthy participant.

(c) Companies have been able to lower their nominal funding costs by using swaps in conjunction with credit quality spreads.

These statements are fully consistent with the objective data provided by swap transactions and they help to explain the "too good to be true" feeling that is sometimes expressed regarding swaps. Can it really be true, outside of "Alice in Wonderland", that everyone can be a winner and that no one is a loser? If so, why does this happy state of affairs exist?

(a) The Theory of Comparative Advantage.

When we begin to seek an answer to the questions raised above, the response we are most likely to meet from both market participants and commentators alike is that each of the counterparties in a swap has a "comparative advantage" in a particular and different credit market and that an advantage in one market is used to obtain an equivalent advantage in a different market to which access was otherwise denied. The AAA company therefore raises funds in the floating rate market where it has an advantage, an advantage which is also possessed by company BBB in the fixed rate market.

The mechanism of an interest rate swap allows each company to exploit their privileged access to one market in order to produce interest rate savings in a different market. This argument is an attractive one because of its relative simplicity and because it is fully consistent with data provided by the swap market itself.

However, as Clifford Smith, Charles Smithson and Sykes Wilford point out in their book MANAGING FINANCIAL RISK, it ignores the fact that the concept of comparative advantage is used in international trade theory, the discipline from which it is derived, to explain why a natural or other immobile benefit is a stimulus to international trade flows. As the authors point out: The United States has a comparative advantage in wheat because the United States has wheat producing acreage not available in Japan. If land could be moved -- if land in Kansas could be relocated outside Tokyo -- the comparative advantage would disappear.

The international capital markets are, however, fully mobile. In the absence of barriers to capital flows, arbitrage will eliminate any comparative advantage that exists within such markets and this rationale for the creation of the swap transactions would be eliminated over time leading to the disappearance of the swap as a financial instrument. This conclusion clearly conflicts with the continued and expanding existence of the swap market.

It would seem, therefore, that even if the theory of comparative advantage does retain some force -- not withstanding the effect of arbitrage -- which it almost certainly does, it cannot constitute the sole explanation for the value created by swap transactions. The source of that value may lie in part in at least two other areas.

(b) Information Asymmetries.
The much- vaunted economic efficiency of the capital markets may nevertheless co- exist with certain information asymmetries. Four authors from a major US money centre bank have argued that a company will -- and should -- choose to issue short term floating rate debt and swap this debt into fixed rate funding as compared with its other financing options if:
(1) It had information -- not available to the market generally -- which would suggest that its own credit quality spread (the difference, you will recall, between the cost of fixed and floating rate debt) would be lower in the future than the market expectation.

(2) It anticipates higher risk- free interest rates in the future than does the market and is more sensitive (i.e. averse) to such changes than the market generally.

In this situation a company is able to exploit its information asymmetry by issuing short term floating rate debt and to protect itself against future interest rate risk by swapping such floating rate debt into fixed rate debt.

Reference Pages

Compararative Advantage

Forward Rate Agreement

Interest Rate Swap