I think the same lesson can be applied to credit default swaps. Instead of asking the obvious, complex, and obscuring question, "What value DO they have?”, one should ask the elegant and simple question, "What value COULD they have?" Even a cursory examination would seem to indicate that the answer is either zero or less-than-zero. This comes from the interaction between debts and fees. In practice the greater the debt serviced (again concocted as if it had value), the greater the fee that would accrue in real terms to servicers. (Again this debt is curiously cast as an asset, often in ways that were supported by nothing other than increasing ostensible future returns that assumed unlimited resources and continuing ability to pay. One would have hoped that the dot.com bubble would have laid to rest the notion of hyped future returns as a good basis to assign value. )

Now we go to the 70 trillion dollar credit default swap market of the past year. If only 1 to 2 percent "service fee" were charged in these transactions (which are based on illusory assets), we're talking nearly three-quarters to one-and-a-half trillion dollars in real term fees being siphoned off (i.e. hijacked from) the global economy for no productive, but merely parasitic, purpose. If these fees are attached to phony assets, as I have propounded, than that means a net loss of, say, a trillion dollars of capital taken right out of the system. No wonder we have a liquidity crisis.

Here is how the scam seems to work. Insure credit default with inadequate capital, assuming the market will always go up. I've heard actual figures quoted in articles I've read that fly-by-night operations were insuring billions of dollars of debt in major banks with only millions of dollars of collateral. So we're talking a tenth of a percent reserve, not ten percent, and the more exotic instruments apparently had no reserve or used the reserve to leverage other risky investments. As the market goes up, everybody's happy. Everybody appears to be making a killing, much like a pyramid scheme... as long as you can get the next person to pay. So now someone defaults in real terms, make that several million people. There aren't anything but IOUs in the system that have been treated as assets and capital. There is no money.

This is why I say that toxic assets may be toxic, but they are not assets, and that they have zero value and likely actually less-than-zero value. If I have insured against loss with only a tenth-of-a-percent reserve, and yet I am charging a percent or two per year for my services, I'm actually charging ten times more than I can actually pay out in case of a default. I guarantee you that those fees were not going into the reserve but into the pockets of the servicers.

This recent posturing by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is nothing more than an attempt to cover up the scam through January, 2009, allowing Bush to duck out, temporarily saving his banking pals, and saving his own skin until he leaves shortly at the end of the present term. It follows a CEO pattern that has been going on since Reagan's deregulatory days. We saw it in Enron. Don't get left holding the bag. Let it blow up on someone else's watch. This time it may not work. Five months is seeming awfully long in the present environment. One thing of which I am convinced, we have just been ripped off trillions of dollars and 700 billion of even real money won't fix the problem (never mind that the this 700 million is simply more debt added to the global system on America's behalf).

As "Devilstower" commented in an excellent diary post on Kos, "Is it altogether a good idea to run up debts exceeding all assets its even possible to own?"


This is Part II of a four-part series. The introduction to the series is titled Imaginary Worth, Empire of Debt: How Modern Finance Created Its Own Downfall (October 15, 2008)

Part I: A 70 Trillion Dollar Counterfeiting Ring
(Zeus Yiamouyiannis, September 23, 2008)

According to several sources the market for so-called "credit default swaps" last year alone was nearly equal to the total global GDP, around 70 trillion dollars by some estimates. Yet these derivatives have no discernible "origin" or value.

Now, how can a supposed "asset" like credit default swaps have a “less-than-zero” (negative) value. First, credit default swaps were insuring debt. Debt is not an asset as I explained in previous essays, but a liability. Mistake number one was to confuse asset and liability.

The proposed 700 billion dollar bailout cannot really “work” from a system level. I know it’s real intention is to cover the butts of Wall Street investors, but you have the same problem in macro that homeowners have in micro. Nobody knows what homes are worth right now, so buyers are sitting it out. It isn’t about restricted credit (even though that is a factor). It isn’t about being too cash strapped to make a down payment (though that too is a factor). It’s about not wanting to be suckered into buying something that may still be overpriced.