{"id":15809,"date":"2015-12-30T09:20:18","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T14:20:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15809"},"modified":"2015-12-30T09:20:49","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T14:20:49","slug":"financial-armageddon-approaches-u-s-banks-have-247-trillion-dollars-of-exposure-to-derivatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15809","title":{"rendered":"Financial Armageddon Approaches: U.S. Banks Have 247 Trillion Dollars Of Exposure To Derivatives"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Financial Armageddon Approaches: U.S. Banks Have 247 Trillion Dollars Of Exposure To Derivatives<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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\"Nuclear<\/a>Did you know that there are 5 \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d banks in the United States that\u00a0each<\/strong>\u00a0have exposure to derivatives contracts that is in excess of 30\u00a0trillion<\/strong>dollars?\u00a0 Overall, the biggest U.S. banks collectively have\u00a0more than 247\u00a0trillion<\/strong>dollars<\/a>\u00a0of exposure to derivatives contracts.\u00a0 That is an amount of money that is more than 13 times the size of the U.S. national debt, and it is a ticking time bomb that could set off financial Armageddon at any moment.\u00a0 Globally, the notional value of all outstanding derivatives contracts is a staggering\u00a0552.9 trillion dollars<\/a>\u00a0according to the Bank for International Settlements.\u00a0 The bankers assure us that these financial instruments are far less risky than they sound, and that they have spread the risk around enough so that there is no way they could bring the entire system down.\u00a0 But that is the thing about risk \u2013 you can try to spread it around as many ways as you can, but you can never eliminate it.\u00a0 And when this derivatives bubble finally implodes, there won\u2019t be enough money on the entire planet to fix it.<\/p>\n

A lot of readers may be tempted to quit reading right now, because \u201cderivatives\u201d is a term that sounds quite complicated.\u00a0 And yes, the details of these arrangements can be immensely complicated, but the concept is quite simple.\u00a0 Here is a good definition of \u201cderivatives\u201d that comes\u00a0from Investopedia<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

A derivative is a\u00a0security<\/a>\u00a0with a price that is dependent upon or derived from one or more underlying\u00a0assets<\/a>. The derivative itself is a contract between two or more parties based upon the asset or assets. Its value is determined by fluctuations in the underlying asset. The most common underlying assets include\u00a0stocks<\/a>,\u00a0bonds<\/a>,\u00a0commodities<\/a>,\u00a0currencies<\/a>,\u00a0interest rates<\/a>and\u00a0market indexes<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Financial Armageddon Approaches: U.S. Banks Have 247 Trillion Dollars Of Exposure To Derivatives Did you know that there are 5 \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d banks in the United States that\u00a0each\u00a0have exposure to derivatives contracts that is in excess of 30\u00a0trilliondollars?\u00a0 Overall, the biggest U.S. banks collectively have\u00a0more than 247\u00a0trilliondollars\u00a0of exposure to derivatives contracts.\u00a0 That is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[63,1668,5983,11339,4901,802],"class_list":["post-15809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-banks","tag-derivatives","tag-economiccollapseblog","tag-financial-armageddon","tag-michael-snyder","tag-too-big-to-fail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15809"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15811,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15809\/revisions\/15811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}