Credit Default Swaps

While regulation comes with a significant price tag, those costs pale beside the losses that banks can incur when left to their own devices. Will regulators take the hint that the cost-benefit fight is one they can win?

To Brooksley Born, JPMorgan Chase's trading blowup looks a lot like the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of 14 years ago. It's "happening all o...

The public opprobrium directed at Wall Street throughout 2008 and 2009 met with no satisfactory reformist result. That leaves us with Occupy Wall Street as the only viable option of steering the nation off the course of permanent high unemployment, low wages, and a shredded social safety net.

Somebody throw some water on the irony meter because it's burning up: JPMorgan could have been spared the embarrassment and pain of its $2 billion tra...

The banking industry is getting personal in its tireless fight against regulation. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and the industry'...

Complicated credit derivatives turned the financial crisis into a catastrophe back in 2008. Now comes a study claiming evidence that these financial i...

Corporate America, with help from the Obama administration, has struck yet another blow against the scary financial regulations it claims will hurt th...

On Monday, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued an order prohibiting the marketing of a new set of derivatives that would have enabled...

Banks and borrowers were supposed to be paying equal rates: the fat years would balance out the lean. But the Fed artificially manipulated the rates to the save the banks.

The disputes over credit default swaps on Greece highlight the fact that most participants in the credit derivatives market are at the mercy of ISDA when it comes to interpretation of ISDA's language. The only solution to that is to exercise one's rights.

The German manufacturing strategy is based on making existing products better again and again, or as a Mercedes ad put it: "We are inventing the car. Since 1886."

A definitive Greek default is thought by some analysts to be quite likely, and to be coming soon.

What should we expect of firms like MF Global and Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley? It's really not that complicated. The ethical standards are pretty clear.

It's time to abolish credit default swaps and similar exotic, impenetrable, essentially unregulated securities. They add nothing to economic efficiency, they line bankers' pockets, and they add massively to global financial risks. Swaps were only invented in the 1990s. Before swaps, investors were perfectly capable of evaluating risks -- and there was less systemic risk to evaluate. The entire banking system is overdue for a drastic simplification that puts banks back in their legitimate business of evaluating risks and then holding onto them, rather than passing the hot potato to someone else. This will require a revolutionary power shift, and it is one the Occupy Wall Street protests are already promoting.

Anyone that bought sovereign credit protection on Greece after accepting ISDA "standard" documentation without modifying the language will now find that they are on the wrong side of an "arbitrage."

So many people around the world support you. As your movement grows, it becomes the movement of ALL of us and the support is only growing. It is the humanity in the stories and the outrage which is beyond justified which is our strength.

If financial warfare is here to stay, doesn't it behoove those who run banks and nations to manage well as any one is vulnerable? And now that we've created this global financial hydra, and global world at large, how's it being managed and is it even possible?

Over the last few days we have seen a tremendous amount of volatility in the markets, epitomizing the lack of clarity with which many investors have struggled.

To ensure another AIG catastrophe doesn't threaten to topple the markets, and the market makers within them, reporting needs a much higher degree of transparency.

NEW YORK (Jonathan Stempel) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc won the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing it of causing an investor to become insolvent by fra...

NEW YORK (Matthew Goldstein) - In the fall of 2009, Deutsche Bank quietly fired one of its top derivative traders in London after a colleague in N...

There must be a contagion of write-offs, sooner or later. Take Greece for example; its 2 year notes are yielding over 29%, but the institutions holding that debt are still valuing the paper at 100 cents on the dollar. And that's just Greece, a small nation on the eastern border of Europe.

WASHINGTON (Kevin Drawbaugh) - Global inconsistencies and industry resistance are clouding the outlook for world financial regulation reform in tw...

NEW YORK -- Goldman Sachs is quietly pushing back against accusations that it may have broken the law, as employees of the firm have met with a pair o...