Posted by Todd Zywicki: Credit Default Swaps and All That: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_02_22-2009_02_28.shtml#1235517129
In Michael Lewis's fascinating essay on [1]"The End" of Wall Street, he mocks the alchemy of how Wall Street could take a bunch of junk mortgages and convert them into AAA rated paper and sell it over and over. But while he mocks, he doesn't really explain what was going on. I just came across a [2]really interesting article in Wired that explains how the alchemy of credit default swaps worked--and why it failed in the end. A really accessible introduction to an extremely complicated subject. References 1. http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom 2. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
