Industry Open-Sources Model For Infamous CDS

GlobalEcho writes "Credit default swaps (CDS) are infamous for bringing down AIG and requiring a bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars. Because the market for these was so murky, the US government has insisted that Wall Street create a clearinghouse for these contracts. In a fresh twist, part of the deal is that the models used to price CDS have been standardized, and that the pricing code was made open source, under a somewhat BSD-like license. The source code (originally written by JPMorgan) provides the basic pricing routines, plus an Excel interface. To my knowledge this is the first significant migration of an investment bank product platform from its usual super-secret proprietary home to the rest of the world."

Comments

Reason: Security

[girlintraining]

Maybe financial institutions are catching on to the idea that open source provides a far greater degree of security, accountability, and maintainability than closed source? Just a thought. Because part of the reason why this situation arose is because of black-box money transfers that didn't have any oversight, and were largely automated. This way, financial institutions can get a far better picture of risk exposure -- and know that everyone else is doing the transactions in the same fashion. In short, everybody knows the rules of the game and who the teams are, unlike before where the rules weren't known until a referee called a foul.

Re:Reason: Security

[DragonWriter]

Maybe financial institutions are catching on to the idea that open source provides a far greater degree of security, accountability, and maintainability than closed source?

Yeah, because the main problem with Credit Default Swaps is that the pricing code used internally in banks wasn't distributed under an open source license, not (among other things) that the distribution of risk of default away from those making lending decisions encouraged those making the lending decisions to commit and encourage others to commit frauds which made the inputs into any pricing model unreliable.

Re:Open does not make them any better

[93 Escort Wagon]

CDSs, priced with open software or not, are the ticking time bomb of the world economy. Nothing better than bookie betting they have created an inflated payout of $50 trillion dollars worldwide that only takes the fall of a few big banks to start.

The lack of regulation surrounding CDS's is just nuts. As explained in that excellent TAL episode you linked to - the situation amounts to people gambling on the banks to fail, with "insurance policies" (what a CDS basically is) having been issued to the extent they amount to 10x the value of the assets being "insured". It's as if 9 other people bought fire insurance on your home, basically hoping for it to burn down.

The whole situation is just absurd - and it's world-wide to boot.

Re:But... but...

[merreborn]

Maybe you haven't been paying attention. For the past four months, all the CEOs of all the banks have been singing the praises of communism. They were so convincing, in fact, that the government handed them $350 billion with no strings attached (which they promptly spent on themselves, bonuses for their lackeys, and on buying distressed companies).

The banks aren't any more anti-communism than Microsoft is. IE: They oppose it when it benefits others or non-executives, and support it when it keeps them and the rest of the American Aristocracy in beach houses and private jets.

No, we got a much worse deal than communism.

Had this been a communist maneuver, "we the people" would now own these companies -- and that's something bank CEOs wouldn't stand for for one second. Instead, we got nothing in return for our money.

No, bank CEOs will never support communism. A true communist revolution would strip them of their wealth and their companies

Communism != communism either

[billstewart]

Hey, don't you remember that "spam" has replaced "libertarians vs. socialists" as the default Internet discussion topic for the last decade? :-)

Marxism-Leninism doesn't actually work that way - the workers may get oppressed under capitalism, but they don't get around to developing the class consciousness that they're supposed to, so the elitist vanguard has to lead them in a revolution and stomp out the bourgeois classes. Since Marxism fails to recognize the value of creativity and risk-taking that entrepreneurs provide, that work doesn't get done after the revolution, so the economy recovers very slowly if at all from the damage done in the revolution, with idealist dogmatism as a poor replacement for the information provided by prices in a market, and the elites end up becoming the new class of bosses, not even the same as the old bosses, and the final stage of Marxist-Leninist communism is a chaotic transition to something like less competent capitalism.

Back in the early 90s, I was at economic conferences in Eastern Europe, and one of the fundamental issues that those societies were trying to solve was how to give the means of production to the workers before the ex-Communist bosses stole all the good stuff; in some cases the former state companies gave stock to the workers, but that didn't happen all that often, and usually only on businesses that weren't worth stealing.

On the other hand, the current top-down government aid paid to huge corporations is not only not either theoretical or real Communism, it's a great reminder that Ayn Rand's morally pure capitalists were more of a fictional device than a description of real capitalism. I don't think I agree with your assertion that the aid is getting paid for by "workers" - after all, we're taxing the "rich", and have been taxing businesses all along, and the bailout money's mostly getting borrowed, either from China or from Westerners who still have assets to invest in T-bills. Some of it will get paid back by your kids, and some of it will get defaulted on somehow, either by finding a way to restart inflation (which is a lot tougher in today's global economy than it was when Reagan did it) or by some new scam.