I am sure you know better, but do you mind elaborating?
If you wish... Interest rate swaps by the way are OTC Derivatives.
OTC derivatives can serve a straightforward role as financial insurance policies covering real business risks. In a hedging scenario, an investor that has exposure to a variable interest rate can transfer the risk to a second investor (the counterparty) by entering into an interest rate swap. A swap is simply an agreement to exchange cash flows. If the interest rate goes up, the second investor pays the difference while the first investor pays the original rate (to the second investor) along with the cost of the swap. Of course, if the second investor becomes insolvent, the original investor is still liable to the lender and will have lost the insurance from risk provided by the second investor as well as any net amount paid to the second investor. Taken in isolation the risks to both investors are limited, but the second investor can offset their risk through a third investor, and so forth, giving rise to a web of interconnected risks.
Other types of OTC derivatives include currency exchange rate swaps and forwards, which are essentially non-standard futures contracts, as well as credit default swaps (CDS). OTC derivatives can be used for speculation, as well as hedging.
You typed looking at OTC Derivatives is silly, it's net exposure that matters ? I am trying to understand how typing such a thing is even possible. There was over 4 Trillion just in US CDS held by the Top 4 banks last year, with the corporate bond market getting rocked in next recession, looking at 4 Trillion of CDS is silly ?
Speculation in OTC derivatives involves no connection to an underlying asset or to a real business risk, but the liabilities and risks they create are real. Under
state gaming laws the speculative use of OTC derivatives, such as
naked CDS (similar to
naked shorts) and
synthetic CDOs, was illegal in the US until
state gaming laws were preempted by the federal government's
Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA).
Officially, roughly
$604.6 trillion in OTC derivative contracts, more than ten times
world GDP ($57.53 trillion), hang over the financial world like the sword of Damocles, but to the average investor the derivatives bubble is invisible. From the perspective of
those outside the bubble, the explosion of OTC derivatives is
a mania.
https://www.businessinsider.com/bubble-derivatives-otc-2010-5