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About what you'd expect from 60 minutes: clever editing, toss a bunch of inflammatory questions at the "villain" -- the ISDA guy -- and then catch his facial expressions while he contemplates how to respond or not to respond to "have you stopped beating your wife." Plenty of self-righteously indignant correspondent shots. Toss out loaded phrases about "complex instruments devised by physicists" but don't bother to offer even a cursory explanation of the basic premises of those instruments...

yeah, 60 minutes dumbs you down.

I have a lot of respect for James Grant. He's no novice to the camera. I wonder if he's happy with the entire piece. In any event, judging by your post, I'd say it had its intended effect.

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CDS are a fascinating market, and they deserve an impartial study, not a soap-opera.

Finally, the problem with the instruments were no more or less than the problem with any other investments. The cause of "the mess we're in" was that investments in these instruments were leveraged wildly; and that the underlying assets were also leveraged wildly. Bad investments happen. When they're leveraged, they're catastrophic. This has as much to do with Glass-Steagal as it does with CDS. While there is much to ponder about CDS, this piece doesn't even come close to an intelligent inquiry.