The paper analyzes the relationship between the credit default swaps (CDS) spreads for 5-year CDS in Europe and US, and fundamental macroeconomic variables such as regional stock indices, oil prices, gold prices, and interest rates. The dataset includes consideration of multiple industry sectors in both economies, and it is split in two sections, before and after the global financial crisis. The analysis is carried out using multivariate regression of each index vs. the macroeconomic variables, and a Granger causality test. Both approaches are performed on the change of value of the variables involved. Results show that equity markets lead in price discovery, bidirectional causality between interest rate, and CDS spreads for most sectors involved. There is also bidirectional causality between stock and oil returns to CDS spreads.

This paper examines the relative contribution of regular and e-mini futures market to price discovery of EUR/USD futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), using intraday data in 2010.The relative contribution to price discovery is estimated using the information share approach proposed by Hasbrouck and Gonzalo-Granger. Empirical findings indicate that regular futures market contributes significantly to the price discovery, accounting for approximately 66.5% of price discovery in the EURO/USD market. This study also examines if the regular future’s information share (IS) can be explained by the positioning of commercial and non-commercial traders. We find a positive significant relationship between IS and both the speculative trade position and hedgers trade position. The results support the conclusion that the IS of regular futures can be better explained by speculators than hedgers.