New York meeting brings iBoxx and Trac-x merger closer

The banks behind the iBoxx CDX credit derivatives indexes have agreed on points that could herald a merger between the index and its big rival, the Dow Jones Trac-x index, following a meeting in New York, reports Risk’s sister publication Credit .

According to sources that talked exclusively to Credit, at a meeting on March 16 the 12 banks behind iBoxx agreed that any merger should focus on uniting the tradable indexes in North America, that a global merger should wait until a later date and that the name iBoxx, which is associated with a string of both cash and credit default swap (CDS) indexes in Europe, should be dropped in favour of a neutral name. But the banks also decided that JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — the two owners of