Should Derivative Reform Include End Users?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

One of the key pieces of financial reform is Blanche Lincoln’s proposal to force derivatives to be cleared on an exchange instead of being traded over the counter in private deals. However, end users like airlines or agribusiness companies, which generally use derivatives to hedge price fluctuations, hate the idea that this would apply to them as well as to banks that use derivatives for speculation. The Wall Street Journal reports:

In a clearinghouse, akin to a cooperative, all parties to derivatives deals chip in to cover losses if any one goes under. To make that work, companies that use derivatives, either to hedge or speculate, post collateral, in case the bets go against them. End users hate this idea. It “will have a significant drain on working capital at a time when capital is highly constrained and credit is in short supply,” David Dines, head of risk management at commodities giant Cargill, told a Senate committee in 2009.

Maybe so. But as Wallace Turbeville has pointed out, the collateral problem could be taken care of easily: the bank selling the derivative could simply extend a conventional loan at the same time they sell the derivative (which the customer would then post as collateral) instead of taking on the collateral risk themselves (which essentially rolls a loan and a derivative into a single package). What’s more, customers would almost certainly get a better price than they do now with packaged products. The problem, Turbeville says, isn’t so much that corporations couldn’t get the loans as the fact that a conventional loan is carried on a corporation’s balance sheet as debt, while the embedded loan in a packaged derivative isn’t.

If Turbeville is correct, the current method of selling OTC derivatives is basically designed to take advantage of an accounting loophole: by packaging a loan together with a derivative, corporations get to pretend that they’re carrying less debt than they really are. That’s probably not something that federal rules should encourage, which means that maybe everyone should just get over their phobia of including end users in the new rules. The derivative market would get more stability and transparency, end users would get lower prices, and investors would get a better picture of corporations’ true short-term debt exposure. And as Tim Fernholz points out, there’s another bonus: if we just go ahead and include end users in the rules, we don’t have to worry about writing complex exemption language that banks will almost certainly eventually figure a way to work around. What’s not to like?

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate