Next time you're about to kill a bug, stop and examine your motives, says the bond fund manager.

Several weeks back, Michael Douglas appeared in public service announcement shot by the FBI, in which he tells people that while they may have been taken by his character in Wall Street, that it's important to remember that that was just a movie and in real life, insider trading is wrong. Next up among actors who think roles they portrayed on the big screen contributed to the financial crisis is Richard Gere. Glamorizing being a corporate raider who made enough money to buy a hooker is his personal cross to bear. It was the modern-day fairytale that captivated hundreds of millions of film fans the world over. But it seems Pretty Woman holds nothing but regrets for its leading man, Richard Gere. While promoting his new financial thriller Arbitrage recently, the 62-year-old shared his scorn for the feelgood 1990 chick flick, telling Woman’s Day, “It’s my least favourite thing.” Richard adds, “People ask me about that movie, but I’ve forgotten it. That was a silly romantic comedy. This is a much more serious movie that has some real cause and effect.” Incredibly, the grumpy star also claims his Pretty Womancharacter Edward Lewis helped contribute to the global financial crisis, as he glorified greedy and selfish Wall Street types. “It made those guys seem dashing, which was so wrong,” Richard explains. Related, what's it gonna take to smoke Vin Diesel out of his hole? It's pretty obvious it was around the time his turn as senior broker in Boiler Room premiered that Dick Fuld ramped up the shit on Lehman Brothers balance sheet that ultimately took the firm down. Richard Gere: Pretty Woman Was Rubbish [WD via Dealbook]

One of the side benefits of Greece taking whatever somewhat irreversible steps it is now taking is that something will happen to CDS written on existing Greek debt and that will mean that we can stop talking about what will happen to CDS written on existing Greek debt and start talking about more interesting things like quasi-CDS written by the EFSF on shaky Eurozone government debt. For now, though, we've got at least a few more weeks of surprisingly and unsurprisingly ill-informed fretting that triggering the $4bn of Greek CDS will Bring Down The Entire Global Financial System. That seems sort of silly because notionals aren't that big, mark-to-market collateral is mostly being posted, and at this point the marks are pretty close to what you'll get from Greece so it doesn't look like there's tons of unknown unrecognized losses lurking out there. On the other hand, we're mostly through with the speculation that not triggering Greek CDS will Prove That CDS Is Worthless and thereby Bring Down The Entire Global Financial System, so that's nice. The reason that's mostly over is that it sure looks like Greek CDS will in fact trigger, as Athens has moved to adopt a collective action clause that will flip the Greek restructuring from "voluntary, heh heh heh" to "involuntary" and thus trigger the ISDA restructuring event definition. You can argue that the mechanics of the cash settlement auction will mildly screw CDS holders but I'm not so sure, and in any case this is pretty solidly in the category of derivatives nerdery rather than Bring Down The etc.

Bloomberg's story about the Greece-Goldman swap-debt-whatever kaboodle, so let's talk about the philosophy of derivatives for a minute. First the story: Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) was a costly mistake from the start. On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said. There are at least three reasons to use derivatives. First you could be into some actual informed shifting of risks from those who want to pay to get rid of them to those willing to be paid to bear them, or from those who have Risk X and want Risk Y to those who etc. Boy are there a lot of textbooks that talk about this. And I suppose it even happens sometimes. You could imagine that a vanilla interest rate swap entered into by a corporation on its bonds or credit facility could qualify as this. I guess people who trade listed options to do covered-write strategies or speculate on takeovers or whatever fall in this category, maybe modulo the "informed." (Sometimes!) Then there's tax and regulatory arbitrage. This is time-honored and much of it, particularly the stuff with the best names, is focused on tax dodging, but there are also various other regimes - securities laws, accounting, whatever - that you might want to get around with derivatives. Paying $10 for CDS with a maximum payout of $10 purely to lower your capital requirements is a recent amusing/egregious example. The thing that wasn't mentioned in the CFA Level I derivatives primer is principal-agent arbitrage. This is ... first of all, let's say this isn't a derivatives issue, or a financial-industry issue, it's like a life issue. (Some would say it's why there's an M&A business, for instance.*) But it's also a derivatives issue! And you can see why if you're as baffled as I am by the Bloomberg story. So this:

If you're into Greece you've probably already read all about it and if you're not I can't make you. But in brief: Greece is fixed and we will NEVER HEAR ABOUT ANY PROBLEMS EVER AGAIN. In less brief: (1) Some folks stayed up all night and produced a statement. (2) Greece's private creditors will be offered the long-anticipated opportunity to voluntarily exchange their old bonds for new bonds, which will for the most part be the same as the old bonds except for minor differences including but not limited to a greatly extended maturity (to 2042), a 53.5% reduced face amount, and a 3.6% blended interest rate. (3) If they don't voluntarily exchange, which they will because - hilariously - they've already taken accounting writedowns (and also because I guess it's better than a disorderly default), private holders will get CAC'ed, which may or may not be as bad as it sounds, but in any case at least CDS will pay out, unless it doesn't. (4) Also the public sector will do various helpful, confusing things. (5) In exchange for this, Greece will enact horrible austerity, and because no one believes that Greece will actually do that, there will be escrow accounts and what Reuters ominously calls "permanent surveillance by an increased European presence on the ground." (6) Everyone is pretty sure we'll be doing this again in six months and, look, just fair warning, I will not be writing about it then, because feh. We haven't had a serious international bankruptcy, which this pretty much is, since I started paying attention to the financial markets, two months ago, so I mostly think about insolvency from a US bankruptcy law perspective. One thing that happens in bankruptcy is that, like, really really roughly speaking, the creditors stop being creditors and become the owners. This isn't always the case but the basic playbook of US bankruptcy law is: