This came in from Lynnea Bylund…

Hello Bob –

I thought you might appreciate this follow-up – an article that refers to the subject of derivatives (The Black Box Economy, Boston Globe 1/27/08) in the same vein as my open letter to you in the June 20, 06 Barter News. –

“A handful of financial theorists and thinkers are now saying [that the] drumbeat of bad news over the past year, … is only a symptom of something new and unsettling - a deeper change in the financial system that may leave regulators, and even Congress, powerless when they try to wield their usual tools.

“That something is the immense shadow economy of novel and poorly understood financial instruments created by hedge funds and investment banks over the past decade - a web of extraordinarily complex securities and wagers that has made the world’s financial system so opaque and entangled that even many experts confess that they no longer understand how it works.

“Unlike the building blocks of the conventional economy - factories and firms, widgets and workers, stocks and bonds - these new financial arrangements are difficult to value, much less analyze. The money caught up in this web is now many times larger than the world’s gross domestic product, and much of it exists outside the purview of regulators.”

See: Blackbox

To build greater financial security for youself and your company become an expert in barter, see: Security

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