“Using these instruments in a way that intentionally destabilizes a company or a country is — is counterproductive, and I’m sure the S.E.C. will be looking into that.” That’s what Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said last week when lawmakers asked him about credit default swaps during his Congressional testimony...
Mr. Bernanke is undoubtedly an intelligent man. But his view that it’s “counterproductive” to use credit default swaps to crash an institution or a nation exhibits a certain naïveté about how the titans of finance operate now...
The certainty that Mr. Bernanke expressed about the S.E.C.’s inquiry into credit default swaps is quaint as well. If the past is prologue, we might see a case or two emerge from that inquiry five years from now. The fact is that credit default swaps and other complex derivatives that have proved to be instruments of mass destruction still remain entrenched in our financial system three years after our economy was almost brought to its knees.
Derivatives are responsible for much of the interconnectedness between banks and other institutions that made the financial collapse accelerate in the way that it did, costing taxpayers hundreds of billions in bailouts. Yet credit default swaps have been largely untouched by financial reform efforts.
This is not surprising. Given how much money is generated by the big institutions trading these instruments, these entities are showering money on Washington to protect their profits. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reported that revenue generated by United States banks in their credit derivatives trading totaled $1.2 billion in the third quarter of 2009.
Congressional “reform” plans for credit default swaps are full of loopholes...
Credit default swaps are “a way to increase the leverage in the system, and the people who were doing it knew that they were doing something on the edge of fraudulent,” said Martin Mayer, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of 37 books, many of them on banking. “They were not well-motivated.”
...Mr. Mayer, for one, believes that credit default swaps must be exchange-traded so that their risks would be more evident. He dismisses the contention of big institutions in this arena that many credit default swaps cannot be traded on an exchange because they are tailor-made for particular customers...
And what of the argument that increased regulatory oversight of credit default swaps will crimp financial innovation?
“This insistence that you mustn’t slow the pace of innovation is just childish,” Mr. Mayer said. “Innovation has now cost us $7 trillion,” he added, referring to the loss in household wealth that has resulted from the crisis. “That’s a pretty high price to pay for innovation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/business/economy/28gret.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business
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