Financial institutions normally prefer not to have everyone think they’re a shitty credit, because that can lead to doom, or MF Doom, or glitchy intimations of doom that quickly get sorted. But it can also sometimes lead to profit.

Sometimes that profit is fake, or fake-ish. When banks book a mark-to-market profit on their own credit spreads widening, that looks … a little fake. We don’t particularly object here, since it reflects a sort of economic reality, but it is probably temporary – your liabilities roll forward and eventually either you pay them off at par, in which case your DVA gains fritter down to zero through PnL, or you don’t, in which case the permanency of your accounting gains are not of much interest to most people.

In any case, because it looks fake, or fake-ish, banks actually don’t much abuse the privilege. Thus most of the DVA gains that banks booked last quarter were on derivatives, where US GAAP requires you to mark DVA to market, or on derivatives-looking things like structured notes where it seems more plausible than not. You don’t see a lot of banks taking a lot of DVA gains on vanilla debt.

So when you have $295bn of public debt (with, I don’t know, maybe a 2 year weighted average duration, whatever) and your CDS blows out by 300bps in a quarter, you don’t book $18 billion of gains. You book, um, $4.5 billion. You never get to taste most of that delicious credit widening.

Now, if only there were a way for a bank to (1) get a gain on its vanilla public debt and (2) make it permanent. Like, say, this, from Bank of America’s 10-Q filed today:
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