good post. the banks often argue that by creating cdsQuote from achilles28:
CDS are a huge part of the problem.
When the Global Financial Community is on the wrong side of a 65 Trillion dollar bet, they're completely fucked = total breakdown unless the Government steps in and prints money. Which is exactly whats going on.
...
Basically, its financial terrorism.
and having them traded they create liquidity for the
debt of the underlying company. i always found that
hard to believe. to me a buying a loan is going long
the balance sheet while receiving a fixed premium. cds
is the same, just the underlying company never sees
a penny.
i either do not buy the argument that financial institutions
can diversify the risk away from their balance sheet.
if they do not want to have it, why did they buy it in
the first place.
the ultimate weird thing to me is the synthetic cdo
market. take a thousand cds underlyings. throw their
ratings and their spreads into a big number cruncher,
connect it to a rating agency model and let it run.
what you get is a tailor made overfit on the credit
market. it is like a trading system with 2000 parameters.
worth: nill. i guess many insurance companies have
a lot of these on their books ...