scary conversation today....i'm starting to understand how derivitives "in general" work....in laymans terms "cjr borrows $5 from paul then loans it to peter for $7, cjr then takes the $7 "on the books" and  via leveraging loans out or gaurantees $35 worth of credit to 100 other friends, each of these friends then does the same thing over and over again until cjr's $5 loan is gauranteeing $200 trillion in various bond instruments...he says if one of these company's (i.e. bear) goes down it starts a snowball affect similar to a run on banks...this is why every central bank in the world will "print what it takes and to hell with inflation"......i thought it was interesting....