How Credit Default Swaps Spread Financial Rot (Audio)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96333239

How Credit Default Swaps Spread Financial Rot

If bad mortgages got the financial system sick, credit default swaps helped spread the illness worldwide.

Like many parts of the financial system these days, credit default swaps are so complicated, simple bankers couldn't have created them. They were invented by people like Gregg Berman.

"My formal training is in physics," he says. "I studied experimental physics and nuclear physics before joining finance in 1993."