Category: Derivatives
The analysis published under this category are as follows.Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Don't Become Wall Street's Next Victim / InvestorEducation / Derivatives
Martin Hutchinson writes: It recently came out that a $1.2 billion derivatives portfolio that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) managed for the Libyan government lost 98.5% of its value between 2004 and June 2010.
If a firm like Goldman will sit idly by while a client eats about $1 billion on a single investment, where do you think you and your portfolio land on Wall Street's list of priorities?
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Friday, July 01, 2011
Derivatives: A Capital Markets Gong Show For Whom The Bell Tolls / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
Back in early March, 2011 – PIMCO’s Bill Gross were calling for much higher rates and telling the world that they were selling U.S. Government Bonds.
PIMCO's Bill Gross Says to Sell U.S. Treasuries Now
03/03/2011
……To wit, he predicts that when the Fed’s QE2 bond-buying binge ends at the end of June, there will be nobody to take the Fed’s place as last-resort buyer of U.S. Treasuries at artificially low rates. Treasury yields will need to ramp up sharply by 1.5 percentage points to attract private buyers. Given that the ten-year U.S. Treasury is currently yielding only 3.5%, a 1.5 percentage point jump would equal a 43% increase in interest rates (1.5/3.5). That’s a big move in interest-rate land and would have a significantly negative effect on bond prices.
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Monday, June 06, 2011
The 0.6 Quadrillion Dollar Systemic Risk? Global OTC Derivatives Counterparty Risk / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
Remember the 0.6 quadrillion dollar problem* ATCA flagged a few years ago in regard to counterparty risk? Guess what, it is still there! The $600 trillion global Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives market is still broadly unregulated although a number of new rules for privately traded swaps -- the biggest part of that $600,000 billion dollars -- have been proposed by the two US derivatives regulators:
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Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Death Derivatives: How Wall Street Plans to Profit From Your Death / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
Keith Fitz-Gerald writes: I just spotted the next global "black swan."
But I think it actually looks like a giant Pteranodon.
I'm talking about so-called "death derivatives."
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Sunday, December 26, 2010
The Derivatives Monster That's 9X Bigger than the Global Economy / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
I assume that you, as an intelligent person who understands that the treacherous, greedy, vampire banks creating so much excess money means We’re Freaking Doomed (WFD), are Up To Your Freaking Ears (UTYFE) in gold, silver and oil, and you have had it UTYFE with your family always complaining about how you spend all the family’s income on gold, silver and oil instead of luxuries, family vacations, adequate food, clothing, medical care, dental care, blah blah blah, the list goes on and on.
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Friday, December 10, 2010
Watching A House of Cards, Part 1 / Housing-Market / Derivatives
Nye Lavalle is best known for his sports predictions. With his family, he founded Sports Marketing Group and stunned many sportswriters with his accurate calls on the popularity of figure skating and NASCAR in the 1990s, among many others. Sixteen years ago, he began investigating mortgage fraud when a bank attempted to wrongfully foreclose on a family property. Many of the issues he uncovered more than a decade ago, like robosigning, are just being recognized today. He continues to try educate others about problems in the banking industry and the US economy.
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Monday, August 09, 2010
The Horrific Derivatives Bubble That Could Destroy Entire World Financial System / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
Michael Snyder writes: Today there is a horrific derivatives bubble that threatens to destroy not only the U.S. economy but the entire world financial system as well, but unfortunately the vast majority of people do not understand it. When you say the word "derivatives" to most Americans, they have no idea what you are talking about. In fact, even most members of the U.S. Congress don't really seem to understand them. But you don't have to get into all the technicalities to understand the bigger picture.Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Derivative Monster Alive and Kicking Despite Financial Reforms / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
Anyone who thinks the new financial reform law will save us from the next debt disaster must be dreaming. Here are the facts …
Fact: The U.S. derivatives that helped cause the last debt crisis are merely being shifted around like deck chairs on the Titanic.
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Wednesday, June 09, 2010
The Derivatives Market and Reality / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
A market dependent on extreme leverage of already complex financial products does require at least some form of stability. This stability, often in the form of financial assistance, was made clear in 2008 when failing derivatives speculators were systematically bailed out after losing billions of dollars and threatening the entirety of the world economy.
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Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Derivatives Market Bigger than the World Economy...Ten Times Over / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
The derivatives market may be better reserved for a fairy tale. Comprising a value worth more than a decade of the world's productivity, the derivatives market is the sleeping giant of all asset bubbles. As you dig deeper into the financial underworld, you'll find that this sleeping giant may just be the puppet master of finance and government.
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Friday, March 26, 2010
Sultans of Swap: ACT III - The Getaway! / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
There are 7 stages to executing a successful sting operation. Whether this is the modus operandi behind the Sultans of Swap operating in the $605 Trillion OTC Derivatives market or just simple coincidence, I will leave it to you shrewd reader to determine. The seven stages do however offer us an instructive theater guide to better understand these murky instruments called Interest Rate Swaps.
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Saturday, March 06, 2010
Financial Speculation, The Global Casino / Politics / Derivatives
Finance is a support function which assists in smooth running of the economy so that there is a continuous flow of funds from those who have excess of it to those who want to use it to create goods and services for the improvement of living standards of world population at large. The players in fulfilling this function are the banks, financial institutions, hedge funds.
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Sultans of Swap - Explaining $605 Trillion of Derivatives! / Interest-Rates / Derivatives
(The Bond Vigilantes are dead - RIP - Long Live the Sultans of Swap)
Every parent has had that moment when their child asks them the simplest sounding question but in that instance before you respond, you realize you have never really thought about it and actually don"t know the real truth. To not have an answer would be to lose all credibility as the "all knowing" parent. Like generations of parents before you - you bluff!
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Monday, July 06, 2009
Derivative Disaster on the Horizon / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
Regardless which type of derivatives you speak about credit derivatives,financial derivatives,futures derivatives or options derivatives these weapons of mass destruction are STILL OUT OF CONTROL. For all of those that say green shoots are growing, they to forget that unemployment has been increasing as well as foreclosures are increasing. Most scary is the unbelievable amount of credit derivatives,financial derivatives,futures derivatives or options derivatives floating around in the US banking system.
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Friday, May 15, 2009
The New Economic Threat From Credit Default Swaps / Economics / Derivatives
Shah Gilani writes: While the entire U.S. housing market was on the verge of collapse and corporate America was being systemically undermined, regulators purposely looked the other way.
Why would they do this?
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Sunday, January 11, 2009
Fair-Value and Mark to Market...The Most Expensive Scam in History? / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
Time for "Surprise-Free" Valuation Standards? - Once upon a time accountants used to count beans. But then they realized (a) that's not very complicated and (b) you don't get paid much for jobs that are not very complicated (particularly after "out-sourcing").
So they decided to be management consultants. That can be as complicated as you want it to be, so it's very difficult to see if you did the job properly or not. Which is why there was (is) much more money in it, because if the punter doesn't have a clue what he's buying you can charge him a lot of money...if you get your branding right.
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Thursday, November 06, 2008
Financially Deluded Gambling Hedge Funds Explode / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
"... The ideal hedge-fund manager was only just out of college when the Asian Crisis hit. He was smoking blunts behind the school bike-shed on Black Monday 1987. He was still in diapers when the S&P lost half its value in '73-74..."
The INVESTMENT TRUST MANUAL for 1928 "was a little book," reports Robert L.Smitley in his Popular Financial Delusions .
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Sunday, October 12, 2008
The Crushing Potential of Financial Derivatives / Stock-Markets / Derivatives
George Soros, one of the world's foremost investor-speculators, has said many times that he stays away from financial derivatives because “no one understands them”. In the world of finance, derivatives might be comparable to the theoretical study of linear particle acceleration in nuclear physics. Such theories appear to be “understood” mainly based on current assumptions accepted in academic circles, often with little provable working knowledge of how such currently-held theories might ultimately manifest themselves over the long run in the real world. The problem with assumptions is that they generally change…often sooner than we think.
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Sunday, September 21, 2008
Lehman's Bankruptcy and the Hidden $138 Billion Bailout of JP Morgan / Companies / Derivatives
We are living in heady times. On Monday morning, something VERY strange occurred:
$138 Billion Post-Bankruptcy JP Morgan Advance to Lehman; At Least $87 B Repaid by Fed
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Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The Mysterious Case of the Commodity Conundrum, Securitization of Commodities, and Systemic Concerns (Part 3) / Commodities / Derivatives
Part 1 , Part 2
"The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical, are really extremely practical—so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese." — Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet (1888)
The mysterious case of the commodity conundrum is sure to elicit passionate debate on either side of the equation—is the commodity boom due to speculation or fundamentals? By the time you read this, a battle in this dispute will have taken place on April 22, 2008 with the CFTC roundtable on agricultural markets.
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