July 5th, 2006, 10:24 pm
If you were asked to pay fixed on a 10 year swap 10years forward, your natural hedge might be to receive fixed on a 20 year swap and pay fixed on a 10 year swap. But then in a positive curve you are effectively receiving known amounts for the first ten years, and then paying known amounts from years ten to twenty. So in some sense you are borrowing money, and I heard someone saying you need to use the 'basis swap adjusted curve' to "account for this", but didn't catch the finer details... I can see that if just use just the libor curve to price the 10y x 10y we haven't accounted for these amounts we borrow. For instance, if you are a usd based bank and you are able to borrow currency (say yen) at below yen libor...(for example using a basis swap)..then we shouldn't be too happy to be effectively paying yen libor to borrow (implicitly through the forward swap)How should I account for this in my pricing? Should I discount the known cashflow differences using a 'basis swap' adjusted curve and then adjust the original 10y x 10y price (calculated from the standard libor curve), or just use the 'basis swap' adjusted curve from the beginning and not even have to bother with the original libor curve? Would they give the same answer? Do forward swaps trade in the market at levels different to what one might expect if you used the standard libor curve?