Clearinghouses Versus Central Counterparties From Margin Calculation Point Of View
Clearinghouses and central counterparties (CCPs) have a notable role in financial markets, namely facilitating securities trading and derivative transactions on exchanges and over-the-counter markets. They have to clear the transactions and carry out their settlements to decrease costs and settlement risk. To efficiently carry out this activity, they need to collect adequate collateral from the trading parties as guarantees. Two main elements of these guarantees are the margin requirement and default fund contribution. Our paper focuses on the margin calculations and emphasizes their notable difference in the case of clearinghouses and CCPs. Our main result is that clearinghouses’ margin requirement is better from a procyclicality point of view; however, CCP margining is more prudent based on our results.