Things that make you say hmmm(Carbon Trading and derivatives)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/sep/20/wallstreet.banking British-born Masters is one of the most powerful women on Wall Street and is widely recognised as one of an elite group dubbed the "JP Morgan mafia" that fostered the creation of the complex credit derivatives at the heart of the current crisis ripping through Wall Street. Many of the highly qualified mathematicians and academics... [more]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/sep/20/wallstreet.banking British-born Masters is one of the most powerful women on Wall Street and is widely recognised as one of an elite group dubbed the "JP Morgan mafia" that fostered the creation of the complex credit derivatives at the heart of the current crisis ripping through Wall Street. Many of the highly qualified mathematicians and academics who worked on the credit derivatives market in the early days have gone on to run hedge funds and into high-powered jobs at other investment banks, but most of them started out at JP Morgan. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aXRBOxU5KT5M These two worlds came together in the offices of Blythe Masters at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Masters, 40, oversees the New York bank’s environmental businesses as the firm’s global head of commodities. JPMorgan brokered a deal in 2007 for Land Rover to buy carbon credits from ClimateCare, an Oxford, England-based group that develops energy-efficiency projects around the world. Land Rover, now owned by Mumbai-based Tata Motors Ltd., is using the credits to offset some of the CO2 emissions produced by its vehicles. Lawmakers Leery Now, that story -- and the entire role the banks played in the credit crisis -- has become central to the U.S. carbon debate. Washington lawmakers are leery of handing Wall Street anything new to trade because the bitter taste of the credit debacle lingers. And their focus is on derivatives. Along with CDSs, the most-notorious derivatives are the collateralized-debt obligations they often insured. CDOs are bundles of subprime mortgages and other debt that were sliced into tranches and sold to investors. “People are going to be cutting up carbon futures, and we’ll be in trouble,” says Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington state. “You can’t stay ahead of the next tool they’re going to create.” Cantwell, 51, proposed in November that U.S. state governments be given the right to ban unregulated financial products. “The derivatives market has done so much damage to our economy and is nothing more than a very-high-stakes casino -- except that casinos have to abide by regulations,” she wrote in a press release. [less]