Credit Default Spreads (CDS): Portugal, Spain, Italy, China

DB Research has a very interesting Website on Credit Default Spreads, which you can find here.
It features CDS for most countries as well as a calculated annual probabilty of default (PD) rate. The datasets are frequently update and downloadable as .xls files (I had to rename the ending of the files to make them work).
The page also includes a graphic, which you can customize with your own recovery rate assumption to come up with the annual PD rate from 5Y CDS spreads.

This is the PD for Italy, Portugal and Spain with a 40% chance of recovery.

The recent impact on CDS by the actions of the ECB are quite strong, at least for now.


Here we see the Chinese against the US PD, again with 40% chance of recovery:

Interesting to me was the strong and clear downward trend in the Chinese spreads, depite (it even seems a bit contrarian) public worries about slowing growth and missmanagement of state run companies and districts/states and the huge media coverage.

For me the lesson is that its always better to double-check the influence/impact of media coverage on the hard economy, since CDS spreads are a reliable figure at least for me, since they signal that other parties are ready to give me insurance against the default of a specific company.

CDS spreads are esp. important  to contrarian investors, which might be looking for countries in a crises (=high CDS) with companies bearing a low domestic (=high foreign) revenue exposure.