Financial Times
Reaction to revelations that Greece used derivatives to disguise its true level of borrowing is reminiscent of Captain Renault (played by Claude Rains) in Casablanca: “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”
Use of derivatives to disguise debt and arbitrage regulations and accounting rules is not new. In the 1990s Japanese companies and investors pioneered the use of derivatives to hide losses – a practice called “tobashi” – “to make fly away”. +
Derivatives, such as interest rate and currency swaps, are used to alter the interest rates and currency of the cash flows on existing assets or liabilities. Transactions entail exchanges of one stream of payments for another. At the commencement of the transaction, if the contract is priced at current market rates, then the current (present) value of the two sets of cash flows should be equal (ignoring any profit). The contract has “zero” value – in effect, no payment is required between the parties.
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