Armageddon, Round Two?

By Michael Panzner on September 23, 2009


In Financial Armageddon, I wrote about “four impending catastrophes”: debt, government guarantees, the retirement system, and derivatives. But well before the first pages of my manuscript saw the light of day, I was particularly concerned about the latter aspect. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret: the article I published in November 2005, “The Coming Disaster in the Derivatives Market,” was actually derived from material in my original book proposal, tentatively entitled FWMDs: Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction, after Warren Buffett’s famous remarks on the subject in Berkshire Hathaway’s 2002 annual report.

Eventually, the publisher and I decided that there was a bigger story there, which proved to be far more accurate than anybody (including me) realized at the time, and I set forth my vision of how the derivatives menace would come to interact with the various other threats I saw lurking in the shadows. Yet even with all that has happened so far, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the house of cards that was built on this labyrinthine mass of paper promises remains a serious threat to the financial system and the economy.

To be sure, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Even some of the better known financial experts are worried, as CNBC.com reveals in “Derivatives Could Cause Another Meltdown: Mobius”: When asked by a CNBC viewer what kind of Armageddon could be expected if the derivatives problem is not addressed, Mobius replied: “The same kind of Armageddon that we just had, what we just saw in the last few years has been caused by derivatives.”

The lack of liquidity, transparency, coupled with its sheer size means the derivatives market poses a major risk to financial stability, according to Mobius. The currency derivatives market is especially at risk of causing problems, but interest-rate derivatives also, he said. Mobius thinks that global leaders meeting for the G20 summit in Pittsburgh next week should focus almost solely on the derivatives trade. Debates over how much bankers are paid in bonuses should be bumped down the agenda, he said.

The derivatives market is ten times the total GDP of the world, or $600 trillion, Mobius pointed out. And the market has been responsible for numerous bankruptcies in recent years as companies don’t know what they have on their books and don’t read the fine print, he said. “The scary thing for me as an investor is what a company has in their books. One of the first questions we ask a company is: ‘What derivatives do you have?’ Because so many companies have gotten into deep trouble because of that. Why? Because there’s no transparency, there’s no liquidity,” Mobius said.