get it together for god’s sake, how hard can it be..

Leading economist Nouriel Roubini explains in bullet-point form how hedge funds are driving the stock market collapse. Take careful note of how credit default swaps are a key factor in the stock market sell-off, and how another type of derivative - "collateralized fund obligations" - may be the next shoe to drop:

derivatives site:globalresearch.ca

http://www.google.se/search?q=derivatives+site%3Aglobalresearch.ca&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Those banks apparently also got nailed

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/10/who-got-nailed-paying-for-lehmans.html

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10535 

We know that issuers of Lehman's credit default swaps will have to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars. But who will actually have to pay that out?

The Times of London writes today:

"About 350 banks and investors are thought to have insured an estimated $400 billion of Lehman’s debt through complex derivatives, known as credit default swaps. These include Pacific Investment Management, the manager of the world’s largest bond fund, Citadel, the US hedge fund, and American International Group, the insurer that the US Government recently bailed out with two loans totalling about $123 billion."

Derivatives are financial instruments whose values depend on the value of other underlying financial instruments. The main types of derivatives are futures, forwards, options and swaps.

The OTC derivative market is the largest market for derivatives, and is unregulated. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the total outstanding national amount is $596 trillion (as of December 2007)^[1].