Which credits are covered by the CDS market?

Part of the attraction of credit default swaps is that in terms of pricing and maturity they are not dissimilar to other methods of trading credit risk, such as loans and bonds. This has helped the market quickly understand and adopt them

In theory, a CDS can be written on any name, and at any part of the capital structure that has an outstanding obligation in the loan or bond market, from triple-A rated sovereign and supranational borrowers down to corporates and other issuers rated as low as single-C.

There is no requirement for the underlying entity to be publicly rated, although the liquidity of CDSs on unrated entities will generally be lower than on rated names.

In practice, however, with S&P and Fitch describing