When viewing web pages and working through our Gmail inbox, we often felt the need to zoom in, as default text size seemed dwarfed by the laptop's ample screen real estate.
By late 2007, the notional value of outstanding credit-default swaps was about sixty trillion dollars more than four times the size of the U.S. gross domestic product.
They artificially lower the interest rates and increase the size of credits as the risk of any future debt rescheduling or default is transferred from private commercial banks to Western taxpayers.
The decision by the Fed to offer emergency liquidity to Bear Stearns and to facilitate its acquisition by JPMorgan Chase had less to do with the size of Bear's balance-sheet than with its central role in markets for credit-default and interest-rate swaps.