I mean, we've always had gold bugs, but now we sort of realize that Treasure Bills might be in the same category. And we have derivatives like credit default swaps which are in this category, and we have derivatives like volatilities that are actually an asset class that we can invest in which are now - would out perform if we have another financial crisis.

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.

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.

I think that's something that investment banks have worried about for a long time and are continuing to worry about, but it's not an easy solution when you have lots of people betting the company's money, how do you really allocate those risks? How do you make sure that the people that take the risks are feeling the risks in an appropriate kind of fashion?

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.

I mean, we've always had gold bugs, but now we sort of realize that Treasure Bills might be in the same category. And we have derivatives like credit default swaps which are in this category, and we have derivatives like volatilities that are actually an asset class that we can invest in which are now - would out perform if we have another financial crisis.

I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category.