Roast beef, salad and the check please.
I notice that you didn't bring up insurance with the derivatives as debt.
for one thing, your bosses made sure that the word "swap"
was used everytime the word "insurance" was needed
in order to keep those pesky regulators out of the scheme.
Dear Maria – Credit protection through a credit derivative is practically equivalent to insurance. Consequently, a credit derivative that has underlying non-performing debt is like a life insurance policy written on a dead person. Dr. Risk thinks it makes sense for an insurance company to write a life insurance policy on a dead person, but it may not make sense for a credit derivatives desk to offer credit protection on non-performing debt.
http://www.margrabe.com/CreditDerivatives.html Or:
“Without nightly margin supervision on CDS short positions these vehicles have turned into the means to launch monstrous focused attacks on specific companies; the buyer has limited risk and virtually unlimited reward.
This is exactly like me buying fire insurance on your house, and in addition I can name the amount of insurance I want to buy, even exceeding the house’s value!
How nervous will you get if I buy $10 million in “fire insurance” against your $100,000 bungalow and then start stacking up gasoline cans in my driveway?"
A used horse race ticket couple with insurance that it will be
good and no counterparty risk. That's where we are.
Oh yeah, and the FedRes saying they'll back this up with taxpayer $$$. $23.7 Trillion. One year. Interest Only on the Quadrillion.
