Erin Duffy Quotes
It seemed glamorous when I used to go into work and get to be on a trading floor or see how the business worked a little bit before I ever understood what it was.
Duffy, Erin. Interview by Courtney Comstock. "We Spoke With The Former Merrill Lynch Bond Saleswoman Who Wrote A Book About Her Old Job." Business Insider, Insider Inc., 10 Feb. 2012.
It was the souped up nature of the credit default swaps that was in part responsible for the souped up melt down of the economy of 2008 and the great recession thereafter. A credit default swap is an insurance policy that a company will pay off its bonds and not go bankrupt. It is a cross between an insurance mechanism and a stock exchange type security mechanism and through heavy lobbying escaped any kind of regulation. It cost a company no money to write a credit default swap and they were paid to do so. As long as business and the economy was good, it was a terrific business but there was no way of ever knowing how much risk they were taking. So companies who wrote credit default swaps did not have to have the money to pay to back them up if they business was bad. When that happened in 2008 even the largest insurance company in the world collapsed because of the risk of having to pay the credit default swap and the U. S. Government had to take over the insurance company. In 2010, the Obama administration passed a financial reform bill that began to regulate credit default swaps.
Jobs led Apple when it became the technology company with the largest stock market valuation ever, yet he freely admitted that he did bit understand the market. He just ran a great company which produced wonderful, innovative products and paid relatively little attention to the stock market and Wall Street.
