On Wednesday, the White House released its plan for reviving financial regulatory reform. And the plan nicely sums up how credit default swaps--complex financial instruments traded between financial firms to cover possible losses--helped grease the way to the current economic disaster:
One of the most significant changes in the world of finance in recent decades has been the explosive growth and rapid innovation in the market for financial derivatives. Much of this development has occurred in the market for OTC derivatives, which are not executed on regulated exchanges. In 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) explicitly exempted OTC derivatives, to a large extent, from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In addition, the law limited the SEC’s authority to regulate certain types of OTC derivatives. As a result, the market for OTC derivatives has largely gone unregulated.
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