Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Economics of Contempt

Legal Commentary

: Economics of Contempt

Still Alive

By Anonymous

I apologize for the lack of posting. As I'm sure you can imagine, things have been beyond crazy for the past 3 weeks. My firm represents a large hedge fund, and I've been at the fund's headquarters in Connecticut for about 2 weeks now (I'm still in CT).

Being in an office directly off the trading floor (and with a Bloomberg!) for the past 2 weeks, let me just say: things are very bad, and only getting worse. I'm honestly scared for the future of the financial system.

How did we get here? There are lots of reasons, but to me, the most important reason is that traders, CEOs, and even risk managers all seem to have forgotten one extremely important thing: In a financial crisis, the correlations always go to one.

From a legal perspective, I forgot how God-awful the ISDA's 1992/2002 Master Agreement and 2003 Definitions are (the standard contracts for credit derivatives). Seriously, I have summer associates who could draft better contracts. This legal clusterfuck will be working itself out for the next 20 years.

Full post as published by Economics of Contempt on October 06, 2008 (boomark / email).