Friday, November 6, 2009

MORE MORON HAZARD

BANZAI7 NEWS--David Einhorn, founder of Greenlight Capital, was one of the earliest and most prescient users of credit default swaps. Now he is calling for these instruments, in effect a form of insurance on individual firms (or governments) that pays out when the institution defaults or restructures, to be banned.

“I think that trying to make safer credit default swaps is like trying to make safer asbestos,” he writes in a recent letter to investors, adding that CDSs create “large, correlated and asymmetrical risks” having “scared the authorities into spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to prevent speculators who made bad bets from having to pay”.

At least one moron sees the hazard.

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