Since its inception, the market for credit derivatives has shown impressive growth and has hit a volume of more than $54 trillion in 2008. Credit derivatives are bilateral financial contracts that seek to transfer defined credit risks in a credit product or bunch of credit products to a counterparty. They have fundamentally changed the way banks price, manage, transact, originate, distribute and account for credit risk; they are being used for risk management and hedging as well as for speculation, balance-sheet management and regulatory capital purposes. Long celebrated as a way for banks to diffuse their risks, credit derivatives have instead multiplied them as they encouraged banks and other financial firms to take on riskier loans than they should have and exposed a much wider array of financial firms to the risk of default. In this book, the author carefully explains the basics of credit risk and expands on the different types and applications of credit derivatives.