Many countries in need of dollars went not to the IMF but to America's Federal Reserve, which opened massive swap lines with hardly any conditions.Recent events have only reinforced the perceived benefits of self-insurance.
An initial focus of the discussions will be confidence-building measures, including how to implement a massive prisoner-swap programme agreed in principle and to be overseen by the International Committee of the Red Cross ICRCC).
Now Wall Street's complaining about a new rule that says they have to put up some collateral before engaging in massive swaps and derivatives deals like those which crashed the economy in 2008.
The inflationists observe that for the moment, money is coming out of the central banks' ears and debt capital is so cheap that a massive debt-equity swap is under way.
The new iteration is decidedly less grand than previous ones; instead of a massive and politically painful swap of tax increases for entitlement cuts, it would lower corporate tax rates a bit to fund some one-off infrastructure spending.
Commenting on today's action in a statement, Dinah PoKempner, general counsel at Human Rights Watch, said: "Surveillance on a massive scale and data swapping without suspicion or independent oversight pose a grave threat to the lives, safety and work of human rights defenders, researchers, journalists, lawyers and their sources.
In addition to espionage cases, the court is also where the U.S. government has opted to try some of the biggest cyber crime cases - like the prosecution of Kim Dotcom's Hong Kong company Megaupload for what is alleged to be a massive scheme to help users swap pirated movies and music.
At first glance, CFTC data on the U.S. interest rate swap market shows a massive financial implosion, as illustrated in Figure 2. U.S. interest rate swap activity appears to have declined by approximately 40percentt between the end of 2013 and the end of 2017.
Mr Carter thinks that, as contracts become standardised, exchanges could grab a big chunk of the market for credit-default swaps, worth a massive $29 trillion in notional value and traded mostly privately.
Should they be made to take a massive haircut, or made subject to a debt-for-equity swap?
