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The quickest way to loose or make money is to bet money on an outcome against another betting agent, hoping that the bank/other party/betting agent isn’t going to go broke before the date of outcome, making your bet worthless. This is why you can bet against this eventuality with another party, like an insurance in reverse such as default swaps, that is to say you get money from the insurer, rather than paying an insurance fee. Unfortunately, should you loose on your bet, you will have to repay all the moneys plus a massive penalty to the insurers, on top of the payout agreed with your counter-betting agent. This game is not for bleeding hearts, nor paupers. 

To state that such ventures can soon become a set of entangled complexities in order to minimise the risks, would be an understatement. Every bet is a minuscule atom is a bigger picture of generalised gambling madness. We don’t know the future. If we did, we would not bet on such outcomes. 

In nature the relationship between prey and predator balances out by the numbers of preys versus the numbers of predators. The more prey is caught, the less predators there can be in a natural confined environment. Betting derivatives beats this balance by only placing a time limit on an unlimited amount of prey-catching possibilities that reduces to two options: you win or you loose. “Faîtes vos Jeux!”. Here the odds are only time limited not value restricted. In order to play the game, one needs LOTS of cash reserve, that make a crown casino look like a pauper’s homeless abode. Owning a bank or a hedge fund is a plus.

So far, our financial institutions have been established on the concept that there is no limit — only "conflation" of the ever expanding system. This is growth like cancer. Our greed is thus transmigrated by hypocritical sociopathy through gains and losses of mega-magnitude that demands no restraint. We live or die (we soon recover with a successful bet) financially with hope of richness rather than feeding a need. This has been the human condition for millennia, leading to wars, structural hierarchies (royal and religious) and robbery. And “we” (our leaders, our institutions and most of us) love it… Of course we have created laws that are somewhat interpretable by lawyers to give the illusion of stability and control in the pandemonium — all designed to keep the majority of humans in a submissive situation, in order for the rarified elites to play on the chessboard of amusingly loaded deception. 

In most (all) cases, betting involves some kind of deception and manipulation of the outcomes. Poker face isn’t a signal for nothing. Luck has little to do with the results — as manipulation of perception through media and opinions can lower or raise the value of what we bet for, before the “échéance” (due settlement date of the bet). We, the plebs, are not pawns, but the derivative-illiterate squares of the playing field, used as stepping stones by the greedy. We don’t fall to the enemy. We just plod solidly.

This would be infinitely entertaining if the cost was merely fictitious cash, and only related to human desires in an infinite universe… But the bets are destroying the planet...

The biggest bet of course has been about the notion of god. There is no limit on “His” (god is a male) bounty and “His” wrath. We bet on the notion of eternity with ignorant fervour. This has been the greatest deception imposed on the plebs by the controllers. 

Big Brother is as ancient as Babylon, 3,000 BC. Rather than being a novel about the future, 1984 was a looking glass futuristically illustrating the past. But we were (and still are) too proud and illused in our freedom-tight-butt to understand this… We saw 1984 as an amusing warning about things to come rather than a situation of where we were at, and came from… Doublespeak is the language of religious beliefs and of economists. 

At present, there is an “alien revival”… We’re bombarded by a few movies and mediatic visions about “alien things” in the sky mostly in the US — though the Rooskies are also giving their two bobs worth about the “possibility" of being visited by “aliens”. You mean some super-intelligent beings visiting Planet Stupido?  Some people (tall- and short-story tellers) would even venture that the presence of aliens is to warn us about what we’re doing wrong to this place. According to Gus precise calculations, the chance of aliens visiting us is about ZERO in a hundred trillion billion precisely. Our better venture is to play our own gambling games with delusions. As Caitlin Johnstone writes, seconded by Gustaphian himself, this floury of alien news is designed to increase the budgets of armies… You can bet on that...

“I binged watching Dr Who all night”… is a line in the Icelandic series, Stella Blomkvist, presently on SBS… You work it out... 

Since awakening to economic values, beyond stealing from each other, and from religious submission, the new big game has thus been “democratic economics”… Same "spiritual” (filling our mind with) important bullshit than the godly adventures, this new level of thoughts gives us all, a chance to participate on a equal footing to the general looting, in order to loose our pants at the profit of the clever manipulators nonetheless. The rich get richer, the poor stay poor… We’re mugged as we “hope” we will benefit from playing… We should realise the dices are crooked and the cards are marked… But we play anyway. We’re born suckers and most of the time we smugly love the thrill of the risks. We go and break a leg on the ski slopes thinking we’re Olympic champs...

Many expert have no clue about “derivatives” either. They are nuclear bombs. This market of risky big potatoes overlays the annual world economy by more than 3,000 per cent. One can only win as long as someone else loses. Not everyone can win, but everyone can loose even if you win, should one of the players become insolvent (rare). A deviation of 2 percent losses on the derivative market could lead to loosing more than half of the world economy overnight. Risk is massive — and only the best mathematicians who have the skill to counter-bet their own adventures can manage this game of economic suicide. 

What Is a Derivative?

A derivative is a "contract” (a serious bet) between two or more parties, the value of which is based on an agreed-upon underlying financial value such as an asset (like a security) or set of assets (like an index) reaching (being at) a certain trending level — at maturity (due date). Common valued items include bonds, commodities, currencies, interest rates, market indexes, and stocks. The contract is in the form of a precisely time-defined bet.

Derivatives either mitigate risk (hedging) or assume risk with the expectation of commensurate reward (speculation).

The fluctuations of the values of the asset will eventually be judged at maturity of the bet, not at the end of time… And your bet could be a few hours out. The trend being up one minute and down the next. People sweat.

Derivatives were originally used to ensure exchange rates more or less balanced the value of goods internationally traded. With the fluctuating values of national currencies, international traders needed a system to account for differences. Today, derivatives are based upon a wide variety of transactions and have many more uses. There are even derivatives based on weather data, such as the amount of rain or the number of sunny days in a region.

And all this “economic” activity has so far being blind to the environmental damage they have done by promoting industrialisation and the burning of fossil fuels. And some Elon talks about Bitcoin using too much energy? Bitcoin is a small trillion dollar operator when considering the derivative market...

Meanwhile, according to Gus’ calculations, we have no more than 11 years before the grand fall of the cliff in regard to global warming. Should we let the derivatives be involved in reducing our emissions of CO2? Is it to late? or can we mitigate the risks? The future will tell us sooner than we think as Nature does not bet, but we do.

Gus  Leonisky

Dorky old kook...