Derivatives Sizing up the market

Three recent surveys of the credit derivatives market—by the BBA, Fitch and Isda—draw differing conclusions about how large the market actually is. But one thing they do agree on is that derivatives are growing—and fast. Laurence Neville reports

In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the cofounders of Intel, a maker of computer chips, predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. He was right; Moore’s Law became gospel, and today there are almost one billion transistors on the chips that run modern PCs.

As far as US Credit knows, no one has been brave or foolish enough to make a similar prediction on the size of the credit derivatives market: but since anyone started counting in 1997, the market has increased by