Concerning the Derivatives Market, I better understand it. For a few years I was a Certified Trading Advisor in both options and futures contracts. I began trading in exchanges in the early 80s, and ventured into futures and options in 1984
Excellent
then you are well informed to know what I said was accurate.
IE the every contract is composed of a long and a short position which balance each-other in terms of the underlying value of the relevant commodity. And as such it is rather meaningless to talk about $500 trillion of underlying risk. You will also know that most/all derivatives are highly leveraged... and so again the "underlying value" concept hugely inflates the actual risk. For example you might have a contract on a million dollars worth of T-Bills... but the actual change in value of the contract in trading would be in the thousands. And even that, in most cases is covered by margin requirements.
What is currently a problem is the "off the books" derivatives that have been set up by large financial institutions. These are entirely unregulated... and that in fact is the problem... lack of regulation and oversight rather than presence of regulation and oversight as you have contended.
In any case, this discussion seems to have gone far afield from the "constitutional issues forum" I will be separating out various of the issue we have been discussing and posting them to new threads on the "Economics forum" I will be starting with your contention (as I understand it that) current Keynesian economics have made the economy far more unstable than some halcyon pre-Keynesian period. If you care to beat me to the punch, you can open this thread and post your views on the topic on the economic forum... or I will do my best to summarized your points
