I don't think the idea of requiring these to be only sold to people who have already own the bonds, in other words, this naked position that the Germans have recently put into their financial regulation and has been discussed here. I don't think that makes any sense.

That is, many times we're not risking our own money, we're risking somebody else's money, or maybe that someone is going to back stop or downside, but we still get the upside.

When large companies take on risk, then they impose risks on the rest of the system. And these are systemic risks and these systemic risks we never used to think were really that important, but as soon as we recognize how the financial sector - the risks the financial sector takes on can impact the entire global economy, we realize that those risks needed to be controlled for the social good.

I think the credit default swaps can take the place of the rating agencies who really have missed the ball in this procedure and are quite conflicted by the way the ratings are paid for. So, I would like to see credit default swaps become an evermore important way of understanding credit risk in the economy.

Allowing short selling is allowing people to sell - instead of having to buy the stock and then sell it, which doesn't do much; allow them to sell it, and then buy it. In which case they can express that information and the idea is that you would get more accurate valuation of companies by letting people express both their positive information and their negative information through either long or short selling.

So what is the role that credit default swaps can play in an economy? Well my feeling is that if these things actually will now be traded on either exchanges or some kind of central clearing, they are going to be a very good measure of the credit worthiness of different companies.

A lot of ambitious code has been written into the law for those and we will have to see if it actually works, if we have another example of a big financial institution going bankrupt.