Outsmarted
The New Yorker: "The Boca Raton meeting first bore fruit when Exxon needed to open a line of credit to cover potential damages of five billion dollars resulting from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. ... but the deal would tie up a lot of reserve cash to provide for the risk of the loans going bad. ... In late 1994, Blythe Masters, a member of the J. P. Morgan swaps team, pitched the idea of selling the credit risk to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. ... The deal was so new that it didn’t even have a name: eventually, the one settled on was ‘credit-default swap.’"
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