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"Most if not all
derivatives contracts are predicated
on interest rates because
derivatives, to a great extent, are time-based.
Interest rates set a valuation on
derivatives products as they measure opportunity cost, i.e. the profit foregone
by putting money into product A when money could also theoretically be made by
investing in product B.
Manipulating
these rates, particularly in the interest of protecting derivatives
investment, does indeed gum up the "immense and recondite" financial machinery
of the world.
The interest rate derivatives market, in which the
underlying asset is the right to pay or to receive
a notional amount of money at a
given interest rate, is the single largest derivatives market.
The
Bank for International Settlements
(BIS) estimated that in June 2012 the value for over-the-counter
interest rate derivatives contracts
(in notational terms) totaled $835 trillion; 90 percent of the world's top 500
companies now use them to control their cash flows." - Patricia
Goldstone
"Between 1973 and 1985, US financial sector
accounted for about 16% of
domestic corporate profits.
In the 1990s, it ranged from 21% to 30%.
After
2000 it soared to 41%." - David Brooks
1960s
Finance and insurance together
account for less than 4% of G.D.P.
1980
"After 1980, in the deregulation minded
Reagan era, old-fashioned banking was increasingly replaced by wheeling and
dealing on a grand scale.
Banks used securitization to increase their
risk. In the process they made the economy more vulnerable to financial
disruption." - Paul Krugman
03/26/09
1982
Dow Jones Industrial Average contains not a
single financial corporation.
1994
"The sudden failure or abrupt withdrawal from
trading of any of these large US dealers could cause
liquidity problems in the markets and could
pose risks to federally insured banks and the
financial system as a whole.
In
some cases intervention has and could result in a financial bailout paid for or
guaranteed by taxpayers."- Charles A. Bowsher, Comptroller General,
Government Accountability Office 1994
1997
Myron
Scholes, the "father" of financial derivatives, wins
the Riksbank Prize in Economics for inventing
the model that has led to financial derivatives.
Myron Scholes later
declares derivatives and
credit default swaps have gotten so
dangerously out of hand that authorities should shut down the market
and start over with regulation in place to begin with.
Brooksley E.
Born, Commodity Futures Trading
Commission chairwoman, is concerned that unfettered, opaque trading
could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any
federal agency knowing about it," calls for greater disclosure of trades and
reserves to cushion against losses and seeks to extend the Commodity Futures
Trading Commission regulatory reach into derivatives.
Brooksley E.
Born's opinions incited fierce opposition from top officials of the
Treasury Department,
Federal Reserve and the
Securities and Exchange Commission
including Alan Greenspan* and Robert Edward
Rubin* who claim traders would take their business
overseas.
1998
"While
OTC derivatives serve
important economic functions, these products, like any complex financial
instrument, can present significant risks if misused or misunderstood.
A number of large, well-publicized financial losses over the last few
years have focused the
attention of the financial services industry, its regulators, derivatives
end-users and the general
public on potential problems and abuses in the OTC derivatives market." -
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, May 1998
What
is a 'Derivative'?
What is an 'Economic Derivative'?
An
insight into OTC Derivatives
November
1999
Larry Summers, deputy secretary of the
Treasury, Robert Edward Rubin,
secretary of the Treasury, and Alan
Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve work overtime to insure that
derivatives are not regulated.
Larry
Summers testifies before Congress that "the shadow of regulatory
uncertainty over an
otherwise thriving market - raised risks for the stability and competitiveness
of American derivative trading."
Larry Summers blasted the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission for having raised" the possibility of regulation
over this market."
Even "small regulatory changes," Larry Summers
cautioned, could throw the whole system out of whack.
Larry Summers,
Alan Greenspan and
Robert Edward Rubin recommend that
Congress permanently strip the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission of regulatory authority over derivatives.
Larry Summers' Debt Swap
2000
David X. Li's Gaussian
copula function
Li was born as Li Xianglin and raised in a rural part of
China during the 1960s.
His family was relocated during the Cultural
Revolution to a rural village in
southern China for "re-education". |
MERS
"The
development of "electronic" mortgages managed by MERS went hand in hand with
the "securitization" of mortgage loans chopping them into pieces and selling
them off to investors.
In the heyday of mortgage securitizations,
before investors got wise, lenders would slice up loans, bundle them into
"financial products" called "collateralized debt obligations" (CDOs),
ostensibly insure them
against default by wrapping them in derivatives called "credit default
swaps," and sell them to pension funds, municipal funds and foreign
investment funds.
There were many secured parties, and the pieces kept
changing hands; but MERS supposedly kept track of all these changes
electronically.
MERS would register and record mortgage loans in its
name, and it would bring foreclosure actions in
its name.
MERS facilitated the rapid turnover of mortgages and
mortgage-backed securities while serving as a "corporate shield" that protects
loan originators from claims by borrowers of
predatory lending practices." -
Ellen Brown
"MERS has reduced transparency in the mortgage market
in two ways.
First, consumers and their counsel can no longer turn to
the public recording systems to learn the identity of the holder of their note.
Today, county recording systems are increasingly full of one
meaningless name, MERS, repeated over and over again.
But more
importantly, all across the country, MERS now brings foreclosure proceedings in
its name even though it is not the financial party of interest.
This
is problematic because MERS is not equipped to provide responses to consumers'
discovery requests with respect to predatory lending claims.
In
effect, the securitization conduit attempts to use
a faceless and seemingly
innocent proxy with no knowledge of
predatory origination or servicing behavior to do
the dirty work of seizing the consumer's
home.
MERS actually
succeeds in foreclosing without producing the original note "the legal sine
qua non of foreclosure" much less documentation that could support predatory
lending defenses." - Timothy McCandless
"MERS as
straw man lacks standing
to foreclose, but so does original lender, although it was a signatory to the
deal.
The lender lacks standing because title had to pass to the
secured parties for the arrangement to legally qualify as a
"security."
The lender, paid in full, has no further legal interest in
the claim.
Only the securities holders have
skin in the game; but
they have no standing to foreclose, because
they were not signatories to the original agreement.
They cannot satisfy
the basic requirement of contract
law that a plaintiff suing
on a written contract must produce a signed contract proving he is
entitled to
relief." - Ellen Brown
ABX
"The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and
short selling them because they
believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit
information that I have ever seen." - Sylvain R. Raynes2006
Wall Street brokers
introduces a new index, the ABX, that becomes a way to 'bet' on the value of
mortgage backed securities.
This
index, modeled on the Enron Trading Desk,
allows traders to bet on or against pools of mortgages with different risk
characteristics using variable stock indexes enabling traders to bet on whether
the overall stock market, or technology stocks or bank stocks, will go up or
down.
Goldman Sachs did quite well on the
collapse using the ABX to bet against the housing market.
Wall Street,
with Goldman Sachs leading, inflated
through deception a credit bubble that burst and cost tens of millions of
Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity.
2007
"I continue to be
concerned about the
influence of pooled vehicles in the
marketplace. I see it as
a ticking time bomb that is going to blow at some point." - Securities and
Exchange Commission Chairman William H. Donaldson, May 24, 2007
What is the difference between exchange-traded funds and mutual
funds?
2008
JP Morgan Chase generates $5.6 billion
profit.
Matt Zames, a Long-Term
Capital Management veteran, runs the JP Morgan Chase
derivatives trading desk.
JP Morgan Chase
profits from the collapse of Lehman
Brothers and the takeover of Bear
Stearns.
JP Morgan Chase
dominates derivatives trading - $87.7 trillion worth of outstanding derivatives
contracts as of September 30, 2008.
JP Morgan's
Financial Herpes
"In the last quarter of a century the whole
American economic system has lived off the
speculations generated by
the financial sector - sometimes given the acronym FIRE (for finance,
insurance and real estate). FIRE has grown exponentially while, in the
country's industrial heartland in particular, much of the rest of the economy
has withered away. FIRE carries enormous weight and the capacity to do great
harm." - Steve Fraser 01/08
"The
banks are trying to win back their losses by arbitrage operations,
borrowing from the Federal Reserve at a low interest rate and lending at a
higher one, and gambling on options.
Options and derivatives are
a zero-sum game: one
losses, one gains.
So the banks
collectively are simply painting themselves into a deeper
corner.
They hope they can tell the Federal Reserve and Treasury to
keep bailing them out or else they'll fail and cost the FDIC even more money to
make good on insuring the "bad savings" that have been steered into these bad
debts and bad gambles.
The Federal Reserve and
Treasury certainly seem more
willing to bailout the big
financial institutions than to bailout savers, pensioners, Social Security
recipients and other small fry.
They thus follow the traditional
"Big fish eat little fish" principle of
favoring the vested interests." - Michael Hudson 06/08
March 11,
2009 Jamie Dimon, chief
executive officer of JP
Morgan Chase, said the US government can rescue the financial system by the end
of the year if officials start cooperating and
stop the "vilification" of
corporate America.
"Giant corporations arose early in the last
century followed by wars, depression, and more wars.
Profit-making
oligopolies and monopolies resulted competing not on price but mainly in the
areas of cost-cutting and the sales effort.
Beginning in the late 1960s
and 1970s, financialization came to the rescue, and "to some extent (shifted)
control over the economy from corporate boardrooms to the financial markets.
Corporations were increasingly seen as bundles of assets, the more
liquid the better.
Financialization produced new outlets for surplus in
the FIRE sector (finance,
insurance, and
real estate),
mostly for speculation,
not capital goods investments in plant
and equipment, transportation, and public utilities that earlier
fueled business cycle expansions.
In
the 1970s, it was about one-and-a-half times GDP.
The 1980s saw an
unprecedented upsurge of debt in the economy.
By 1985, it was double,
and by 2005 it was three-and-a-times GDP, rising, and approaching the $44
trillion (level) for the entire world.
Ever since, the way was open for
a proliferation of financial
instruments and markets, which (until the
present) proved to be literally unlimited.
Keynes warned about "enterprise becoming the bubble on a whirlpool of
speculation" like in the 1920s, the price being the
Great Depression.
Bubbles grow
until they burst.
Minor by comparison, the 1997-98 Asian crisis showed
how fast contagion can spread.
Today it's global and
out-of-control.
No one's
sure how to contain it, so bankers are printing trillions in a desperate
attempt to socialize losses,
privatize profits, and pump life back into a corpse
through a sort of shell game or
grandest of grand theft
process of sucking wealth from the public.
Speculation and debt need more of it to
prosper, but in the end it's a losing game." - Stephen Lendman
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