THIS IS NOT CREDIT CRISIS!
Mansoor Durrani* Past: When Mr Warren Buffet, the richest man in the world, called some financial instruments like the Derivates and Credit Default Swaps (CDS) ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ over three years back, few of us took notice. The world economy was on the roll. European realty and financial markets were booming. US was ‘winning the war on terror’. And rest of the world was blindly aping this mirage called ‘American Dream’. Some high level articles on alternate perspectives of the present crisis have recently been published. For a commoner to understand this mess, we need to go back to basics. Derivatives can be described as like putting a mirror in front of another mirror, allowing a physical object to be reflected into infinity. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has identified ‘comprehensive failure of extreme capitalism’ as a cause of this economic crisis. He attributed greed and fear as the ‘twin evils’ at the root of the financial sector collapse. Interest an