The Dollar Llama

[hairyears]

Would you believe that someone's found a way of monetising the End of the World?

Enterprising Atheists are taking money from Christian Fundamentalists,offering a pet care service for the animals left behind when their owners ascend to Heaven in The Rapture

Comments

[gerald_duck]

Would naked credit default swap against Treasury Bonds not monetize default?

Looks like I picked the wrong week to hold dollars. )-8

[hairyears]

No, it wouldn't. Not on a risk-adjusted basis.

If we choose to consider just one side of a bet, anything looks profitable - but being on the losing side of that swap represents bankruptcy. What would you pay out with?

On a more practical note, who's buying? Serious buyers, I mean - the kind of people who'd do 'due diligence' and satisfy themselves that the issuer could actually pay out in the event of a default. Because only fools pay an 'insurance premium' to an insurer that they know won't pay.

Covered credit swaps are quite another matter. But that's a difficult trade to make a profit on: it's getting damned expensive to get hold of non-dollar and non-dollar-correlated assets that would hedge the trade.

[gerald_duck]

Naked CDS against a CDS against Treasury Bonds? (-8

More seriously, while the USA is a big economy, it's not the totality of world finance. And in reality what we're talking about isn't monetizing the USA's economy going into total meltdown, rather monetizing a short-term technical default - an exposure of half a billion dollars a day.

Even if someone on the losing side of the naked CDS would be bankrupt if the USA somehow failed to repay the principal on its bonds, that surely doesn't make the CDS worthless to the winner, if the loser can still make good a smaller, and more realistic, default?

People like giving momentous events specific causes and dates - the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and all that. Maybe in future decades people will look back on this coming week as the moment when the USA's rôle as the world's dominant economy ended. I just hope posterity blames Bush rather than Obama. )-8

[jamesofengland]

Putting aside the hyperbole involved in suggesting that it's difficult to buy treasury CDSs from banks that are likely to survive for the next few years, in some form or another, I've got friends in Detroit, which has been having a pretty good recovery. For the first time since Schwarzenegger took office, Detroit's unemployment is lower than California's. There's a reasonably good chance that Michigan will fall below the US mean in the next few months. They're passing balanced budgets. Their gdp/ capita is low by US standards, roughly the same as the UK, but their growth has been beating the US mean for the first time in a while. I'd be surprised if MI was a leading producer of new shanty towns over the next few years; you're thinking about the MI of circa '08, when there were indeed many such horror stories (my friends were there then, too). It's in a good region, too, with all of its neighbors doing well. They're not doing as well as the flyover states; none of them are going to have North Dakota's 3.2% unemployment any time soon.

[hairyears]

Hoover's public works programmes... You are referring to the Emergency Relief and Construction Act? This is rightly regarded as 'too little, too late' and followed years of depressing economic rectitude in the form of a laissez-faire, low-tax, low-deficit, low-welfare policy that is - with one glaring exception - very much the contractionist policy of the Right.

The exception is, of course, the Republicans' avid enthusiasm for ever-expanding deficits. That being said, it's questionable whether the Bush-era war-and-pork-barrel GOPpers would be recognisable as Republicans in 1930, and it is chastening, in 2011, to discover that Hoover and Mellon's economic policies were overridden by Congress, who imposed the biggest tax increases in American history.

Feel free to expand on all of this: I have to admit that my knowledge of the period comes from sources that are somewhat partisan - and I have some doubts about the Wikipedia article, a summary which raises my suspicions in being all-too-closely in agreement with what I hear from

[jamesofengland]

Too little? I mean, in the same way as communism has never been tried

[jamesofengland]

I think that the NYT article has an oddly labelled axes, and that the below trend growth is an '07 thing. But, yeah, it's been a really terrible downturn, and things will get worse when terrible things happen in Europe and China.