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Old 07-29-2003, 07:28 PM   #8
tw
Read? I only know how to write.
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 11,933
I don't understand all the emotion about a financial instrument to share or minimize the negative effects of terrorism ... or flood, or earthquake, or shipwreck. Farmers use future contracts to spin off risk onto other financial markets so that they don't suffer a 'sink or swim' situation every year. Unfortunately, insurance markets - even Lloyds - refuse to enter this needed market.

But here is the rub. If such markets are used, like flood insurance does today, to maintain a bad situation, then government will become the insurer of last resort - an unacceptable situation.

World markets are more than just distributing capital - creditors and debtors. Future's markets and risk markets are also essential to a productive world economy. Look what happened to CA when idiot corporate electric utility executives (lawyers and MBAs rather than people with electric utility experience) eliminated access to and use of future's contracts.

Heaven or hell will be defined in the details - how such a market sets up. But this is not something to be emotional about. This is a market made necessary by rare events called terrorism - like earthquakes, floods, tornados, crop losses, mine failures, etc.
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