The Economics Of Derivatives

This book examines the beneficial and adverse effects of derivatives trading from economic theory and the recent economic history.

A comprehensive, concise treatment of the subject of derivatives focusing on making essential concepts accessible to wider audiences.

What are the links between things as diverse as the prices of pork bellies, interest rates, and corporate stock? They are all being translated into risk and priced through the system of derivative markets. Financial derivatives are now the largest form of financial transaction in the world, and they are transforming in pervasive ways the lived experience of capitalist economies. Financial derivatives are anchoring the global financial system and challenging the conventional understanding of ownership, money and capital. These challenges are examined in this book, providing a significant reinterpretation of contemporary capitalism that will be of interest to both social scientists and conventional finance scholars.

Breger Bush argues that derivatives markets work in the development context as engines of inequality and instability, aggravating poverty among those they are purported to help and highlighting some of the dangers of neoliberal globalization for the poor.

The contributors to this volume draw upon their deep backgrounds in finance, the social sciences, arts, and the humanities to create a new way of understanding derivative capitalism that does justice to its technical, social, and cultural dimensions. The financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated both that derivatives are capable of producing great wealth and that their deregulation and privatization cannot control the risks that they produce. A popular reaction is to focus on the regulation or abolition of derivative finance. These authors take a different tack and instead raise the question: if we should want access to the wealth that derivatives are capable of producing, what kind of social institutions and policies would be needed to make such wealth production work for the benefit of all of us? Since this question goes to the very heart of what kind of society is most desirable, the volume argues that we need both a social understanding of the derivative and a derivative understanding of the social. The derivative reading of the social employs a small set of financial concepts to understand certain defining dimensions of contemporary reality. The central concept is that of volatility and its relations to risk, uncertainty, hedging, optionality, and arbitrage. The social reading of the derivative involves anthropological discussions of the gift, ritual, play, and performativity and provides us with frames of embodiment for analyzing, through action and event, the ways derivatives do their work.

Derivatives were responsible for one of the worst financial meltdowns in history, one from which we have not yet fully recovered. However, they are likewise capable of generating some of the most incredible wealth we have ever seen. This book asks how we might ensure the latter while avoiding the former. Looking past the usual arguments for the regulation or abolition of derivative finance, it asks a more probing question: what kinds of social institutions and policies would we need to put in place to both avail ourselves of the derivative’s wealth production and make sure that production benefits all of us? To answer that question, the contributors to this book draw upon their deep backgrounds in finance, social science, art, and the humanities to create a new way of understanding derivative finance that does justice to its social and cultural dimensions. They offer a two-pronged analysis. First, they develop a social understanding of the derivative that casts it in the light of anthropological concepts such as the gift, ritual, play, dividuality, and performativity. Second, they develop a derivative understanding of the social, using financial concepts such as risk, hedging, optionality, and arbitrage to uncover new dimensions of contemporary social reality. In doing so, they construct a necessary, renewed vision of derivative finance as a deeply embedded aspect not just of our economics but our culture.

Derivatives Markets is a thorough and well-presented textbook that offers readers an introduction to derivatives instruments, with a gentle introduction to mathematical finance, and provides a working knowledge of derivatives to a wide area of market participants. This new and accessible book provides a lucid, down-to-earth, theoretically rigorous but applied introduction to derivatives. Many insights have been discovered since the seminal work in the 1970s and the text provides a bridge to and incorporates them. It develops the skill sets needed to both understand and to intelligently use derivatives. These skill sets are developed in part by using concept checks that test the reader's understanding of the material as it is presented. The text discusses some fairly sophisticated topics not usually discussed in introductory derivatives texts. For example, real-world electronic market trading platforms such as CME’s Globex. On the theory side, a much needed and detailed discussion of what risk-neutral valuation really means in the context of the dynamics of the hedge portfolio. The text is a balanced, logical presentation of the major derivatives classes including forward and futures contracts in Part I, swaps in Part II, and options in Part III. The material is unified by providing a modern conceptual framework and exploiting the no-arbitrage relationships between the different derivatives classes. Some of the elements explained in detail in the text are: Hedging, Basis Risk, Spreading, and Spread Basis Risk Financial Futures Contracts, their Underlying Instruments, Hedging and Speculating OTC Markets and Swaps Option Strategies: Hedging and Speculating Risk-Neutral Valuation and the Binomial Option Pricing Model Equivalent Martingale Measures: The Modern Approach to Option Pricing Option Pricing in Continuous Time: from Bachelier to Black-Scholes and Beyond. Professor Goldenberg’s clear and concise explanations and end-of-chapter problems, guide the reader through the derivatives markets, developing the reader’s skill sets needed in order to incorporate and manage derivatives in a corporate or risk management setting. This textbook is for students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, as well as for those with an interest in how and why these markets work and thrive.

In The Social Life of Financial Derivatives Edward LiPuma theorizes the profound social dimensions of derivatives markets and the processes, rituals, and belief systems that drive them. In response to the 2008 financial crisis and drawing on his experience trading derivatives, LiPuma outlines how they function as complex devices that organize speculative capital as well as the ways derivative-driven capitalism not only produces the conditions for its own existence, but also penetrates the fabric of everyday life. Framing finance as a form of social life and highlighting the intrinsically social character of financial derivatives, LiPuma deepens our understanding of derivatives so that we may someday use them to serve the public well-being.