Saturday, September 20, 2008

Bob Chapman

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10265

So it's not to hard to realize bailing out Wallstreet just allows them to continue to create more of the monster that grows and absorbs all that could otherwise be healthy
The giant black hole of
Derivatives





The point everyone misses," wrote economist Robert Chapman a decade ago, "is that buying derivatives is not investing. It is gambling, insurance and high stakes bookmaking. Derivatives create nothing."1 They not only create nothing, but they serve to enrich non-producers at the expense of the people who do create real goods and services. In congressional hearings in the early 1990s, derivatives trading was challenged as being an illegal form of gambling. But the practice was legitimized by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who not only lent legal and regulatory support to the trade but actively promoted derivatives as a way to improve "risk management." Partly, this was to boost the flagging profits of the banks; and at the larger banks and dealers, it worked. But the cost was an increase in risk to the financial system as a whole.2