Transparent Obfuscation

A Rescue Plan With the Clarity of a Credit Default Swap

By Michael Kinsley
WashPost
Friday, March 27, 2009

"The parties may elect in respect of two or more Transactions that a net amount will be determined in respect of all amounts payable on the same date in the same currency in respect of such Transactions, regardless of whether such amounts are payable in respect of the same Transaction."

Got that? It's a sentence, chosen more or less at random, from the most recent (2002) Master Agreement of the International Swap and Derivatives Association. These are the people who brought you the "credit default swap," the mysterious financial transaction that almost destroyed the world, and might yet do so if the Obama administration's rescue plan doesn't work. The Master Agreement is used for credit default swaps the way a standard real estate broker's lease is used for renting a one-bedroom apartment.

Except that we all know what a one-bedroom apartment is. How many of us know what a credit-default swap is? The media do their best to explain it, often using attractive drawings with arrows showing money going hither and thither. Or sometimes they throw up their hands, as I'm doing, and simply describe them as "exotic financial instruments," and leave it at that. Part of the hostility that banks and Wall Street now enjoy comes from a popular suspicion that the mystery and complexity are part of the point -- that these things are made impossible to explain on purpose, as a way of avoiding scrutiny. "Don't criticize what you can't understand," as the financier Bob Dylan once put it in another context.

(More here.)