In 2002, Warren Buffett warned that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction” after he took over the insurance company General Re and tried to sell its derivative book. Few listened to Buffett, and in the years since, these derivatives grew about 500 percent.
You can see in this slide below, the magnitude of these derivatives compared to other financial measures. At more than $500 trillion, they are five times larger than the total value of the world’s stock and bond markets, and they’re 10 times larger than global GDP.
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