Posted on 10/08/2008 7:46:06 AM PDT by oioiman
That's very helpful thanks.
bookmarked
Nah, it’s all about ACORN mortgages. The fact that Wall Street pumped them up to 70 or so trilliion dollars worth of popcorn farts doesn’t figure in at all.
What’s not there to understand?
bump to read when i get home.
Looks ok to me, why don't you explain what he got wrong.
Right now everyone on FR (and many other places) has got it in their heads that derivatives (and leverage) are "clearly" a problem, but it isn't so. They are sharp knives, and shouldn't be played with by children. But they have done far more good than harm in the financial markets.
But the truth is, at this point I should know better than to speak up about it. The discussion long ago stopped being about things like facts, and now it's all about casting blame. I've seen this before. We go through it every few years or so, whenever the kids get into the knife drawer.
And now we're going to get some poorly designed regulation designed to prohibit leverage and the use of derivatives in spite of the fact that it's their misuse that's been a problem and not their use. Frank and Schumer will use this to limit our rights and even the people on FR will cheer them on becasue it's all about the evil "derivatives".
Do you have a source for that claim? The estimates I saw were $16 Trillion to $62 Trillion depending on whose estimates you followed...
Among other crazy illogical long term financial procedures.
I concur with the above, what's not to understand?
Your “sharp knives” analogy is right on the money, but this is always the way of the world isn’t it? I mean, something bad happens, and if it’s big enough and bad enough, government gets involved, bumbles through an “investigation” and ultimately puts forth a bad piece of legislation designed to “make sure this never happens again”. Just look at the “zero tolerance” rules that, to borrow the knife analogy, schools rely on to send a kid home for bringing a rubber toy knife for “show and tell”. One can hope for intelligent analysis and thoughtful legislation, but that’s probably like hoping Wiley Coyote will have the insight to develop a tactical cruise missile rather than just dropping a 1000 pound weight off the cliff.
Most people have no clue what financial shenanigans went on and have no concept of finance that reaches beyond the mortgate they signed. That’s what the author was trying to address.
That's not correct. They have added a great deal of systemic risk so that the normal credit deleveraging that has to happen in a credit cycle can no longer happen without triggering system wide defaults. Derivatives only lower risk for the parties who use them, and only if they are trading non-leveraged payment streams (e.g. interest swaps). What is described in the article goes far beyond that and is forcing the ongoing meltdown. The evidence from today's flailing by central banks followed by a market drop shows that the problem is not just credit itself.
This was supposed to be a “primer” and it serves that purpose. In fact, the underlying theme here is that the kids got into the kitchen knife drawer and went berserk, cutting each other to shreds even as their parents were passed-out drunk in a family room lit up by a TV test pattern.
You're mistaken about that, but I'm sure that's how it appears if you don't see the whole picture.
Tell Frank and Schumer I said hello.
Then let me offer my tutorial. Take two playing cards from a deck. Stand them on edge and lay another card across them. Repeat the process atop the first three cards until all cards in the deck are used. Should you succeed in reaching this point, pull out any one card and at the same time keep the structure from falling.
Since this isn’t really a tutorial I won’t charge my normal fee but you will have to furnish your own cards.
I understand your concern that people don't understand the problem, and that wrong regulations might make things worse, but that doesn't mean there should be absolutely no regulation. The more people are educated, the more likely any new regulation won't be just a backlash against losses out of fear, but something wisely and prudently thought out, to at least force companies to be more transparent so investors understand better what their real risks are. (Please, I am not an investment or finance person so that is why I'm trying so hard to understand all of this.)
Tell Cash and Carry I wish him luck.
Here is the total of the 2 main forms of derivatives (Exchange and Non-exchanged traded)
Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives are contracts that are traded (and privately negotiated) directly between two parties, without going through an exchange or other intermediary. Products such as swaps, forward rate agreements, and exotic options are almost always traded in this way. The OTC derivative market is the largest market for derivatives, and is unregulated. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the total outstanding notional amount is $596 trillion (as of December 2007)[1]. Of this total notional amount, 66% are interest rate contracts, 10% are credit default swaps (CDS), 9% are foreign exchange contracts, 2% are commodity contracts, 1% are equity contracts, and 12% are other. OTC derivatives are largely subject to counterparty risk, as the validity of a contract depends on the counterparty’s solvency and ability to honor its obligations.
Exchange-traded derivatives (ETD) are those derivatives products that are traded via specialized derivatives exchanges or other exchanges. A derivatives exchange acts as an intermediary to all related transactions, and takes Initial margin from both sides of the trade to act as a guarantee. The world’s largest[2] derivatives exchanges (by number of transactions) are the Korea Exchange (which lists KOSPI Index Futures & Options), Eurex (which lists a wide range of European products such as interest rate & index products), and CME Group (made up of the 2007 merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade and the 2008 acquisition of the New York Mercantile Exchange).
Derivatives Trade Soars To Record $681 Trillion. The Bank for International Settlements [BIS] is reporting Derivatives traded on exchanges surged 27 percent to a record $681 trillion in the third quarter of 2008.
So $596 Trillion (Non-exchange traded as of December 2007), plus the Exchange-traded ($681 Trillion as of Sept 2008) equals $1,277 Trillion or roughly $1.28 QUADRILLION, and if you assume another $100 Trillion or so for the first 9 months of 2008 in Non-exchange traded derivatives, the total approaches $1.4 QUADRILLION. go to The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) website http://www.bis.org/index.htm and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) website http://www.isda.org/index.html for confirmation.
IMPORTANT NOTE- notice that non-exchange traded derivatives are NOT REGULATED
Up to very recently I always thought conservatives were more considered and thoughtful than liberals, but I've come to realize that they are just as prone to a knee jerk response as liberals, even if it's a different knee they're jerking. Ad because of that, they are justas prone to manipulation by the powerful as any kool aid drinking liberal. Barney Frank and chuck Schumer are the enemies of everyhting that conserviatves say they want. But they are going to use this 'emergency' to gain as much control over the lives of Americans as rthey can, and MANY on FR will be cheering them on.
Almost everything you are hearing about 'how bad derivatives are' is misleading. That isn't to say it's wrong ... but the typical method is to present such facts (whether irrelevant or not) as meaningful and leave out much of the story that actually is relevant. Its like calling John McCain a coward because he didn't once engage in combat during the year 1968.
All your replies are pure sophistry. You sound like a defender of a system that is useful only if a small cadre wants to financially create a web of entanglement far beyond any real amount of wealth that will ever exist,then usher in a police-state world government after the destruction of all state-based sovereignty.
There is no way you can justify this type of leverage on extraordinarly unsound investments. Also, the mortage-based securities could have all been covered had THEY NOT BEEN LEVERAGED beyond all reason. Then swap derivatives as hedge insurance were added on top. The whole thing was an ephemeral house of cards, bound to collapse as soon as a systemic area of weakness (in this case drivatives based on mortgages) punctured the balloon.
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