That alone is enough to illustrate the situation. If you must have a cherry on top, worldwide derivatives are likely in excess of 1 quadrillion dollars.
> That alone is enough to illustrate the situation. If you must have a cherry on top, worldwide derivatives are likely in excess of 1 quadrillion dollars.
That's the `notional' of the derivatives. That's more or less a made up number, and has not much to do with how much money actually changes hands.
The way the notional derivatives are defined, you'd actually want to see huge numbers there. It means that exploitable price differences are so small, that you need lots of gearing to make money off of them. Small price difference === other market participants get a fair price on buying and selling.
Yes. The telecoms are government regulated, and they suck. Now the internet can be regulated likewise, and start to suck. Any time the government offers something, it expects much in return.
I'd rather have Google, et al, provide a market solution to this, by aggressively expanding Fiber without regulation, and laying down a secondary network to compete with Comcast/Time Warner. As it stands this is starting to look more and more like an attempt to maintain power for the traditional shitty telecoms, while also taking a slice out of Google's pie.
