People hear my clear, clarion call for them to buy gold, silver and oil as their protection from the monetary and fiscal stupidities which abound – abound! – all around us, and they have questions, such as the one that is burned into my brain from an altercation this morning outside of the hardware store, [...]

Central counterparty for OTC derivatives
Jayanth Varma is astounded that some corporate treasurers think that their derivatives positions should not be backed by collateral. I am too. On a related track, there is news today that [...]

There is a fascinating article in The Economist about how the world of derivatives has shaped up through the crisis.
I often encounter misconceptions about hedging. The one line that summarises the issue is this: The job of a hedging strategy is to combat extraneous economic exposure. Let me focus on currency exposure as an example, [...]

The inherently unstable, fundamentally unsound and immoral worldwide financial system organized out of intrinsically worthless debt has exploded into derivatives and imploded into a greater depression.  Several of the stronger voices in the financial press evade the D word which hangs over the world economy like the Sword of Damocles.
But Yahoo Finance! reports, “The Obama administration is asking Congress [...]

I happened to glance at the top 10 underlyings in derivatives trading at NSE and saw this:

I remember not so long ago, when the only thing that traders in India could think about was individual stocks. At the time, it was extremely difficult to get them interested in macro underlyings.
I find it quite striking that [...]