Pope Francis slams credit-default swaps market, call derivatives 'a ticking time bomb'
Warren Buffett once called them “financial weapons of mass destruction.”
Now Pope Francis, of all people, is taking aim at derivatives.
In a sweeping critique of global finance released by the Vatican on Thursday, the Holy See singled out derivatives including credit-default swaps (CDS) for particular scorn. “A ticking time bomb,” the Vatican called them. The unusual rebuke — derivatives rarely reach the level of religious doctrine — is in keeping with Francis’s skeptical view of unbridled global capitalism.
“The market of CDS, in the wake of the economic crisis of 2007, was imposing enough to represent almost the equivalent of the GDP of the entire world. The spread of such a kind of contract without proper limits has encouraged the growth of a finance of chance, and of gambling on the failure of others, which is unacceptable from the ethical point of view,” the Vatican said in the document.
The critique echoes comments made by Buffett in 2003, when he criticized the “unchecked” expansion of the derivatives market. Francis has been a critic of Wall Street in the past. He has called for regulating speculative financial practices and reining in the “absolute power” of the financial system, which he said would bring more crises.
At: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-17/pope-goes-off-on-cds-market-calls-derivatives-ticking-time-bomb
