Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 18, Number 3—Summer 2004 —Pages 173–192

Should We Fear Derivatives?

René M. Stulz

I n chemistry, a derivative is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a

“substance related structurally to another substance and theoretically deriv-
able from it” or “a substance that can be made from another substance.”
Derivatives in finance work on the same principle. They are financial instruments
whose promised payoffs are derived from the value of something else, generally
called the “underlying.” The underlying is often a financial asset or rate, but it does
not have to be. For instance, derivatives exist with payments based on the level of
the Standard and Poor’s 500, the temperature at John F. Kennedy International
Airport or the number of bankruptcies among a group of selected companies.
The last 30 years have seen an astounding growth in the market for derivatives.
Some estimates of the current size of the market for derivatives exceed $200 trillion,
which is more than 100 times what it was 30 years ago, when most of the derivatives
that comprise this market were not even available.
When derivatives cause losses, they can make headlines. In recent years,
derivatives have been associated with the collapse of the Queen’s banker (Barings);
with a hedge fund that counted among its partners academics rewarded with a
Nobel Prize for their work on pricing derivatives (Long-Term Capital Manage-
ment); with the collapse of the Thai baht; and with the fall of Enron. Warren
Buffett (2003) recently drew attention with a blistering attack on derivatives, writing
in the 2002 annual report of Berkshire Hathaway that “derivatives are financial
weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are poten-
tially lethal.”
Do derivatives mostly threaten firms and the economy, or do they increase

y René M. Stulz is the Reese Professor of Banking and Monetary Economics, The Ohio State
University, Columbus, Ohio, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research,
Cambridge, Massachusetts. His e-mail address is 具[email protected]典.
174 Journal of Economic Perspectives

welfare? I first explain the main types of derivatives and describe how they are
priced. I then show how the markets for derivatives grew to their current size and
what this size means. Next, I discuss the benefits from derivatives usage and
examine the evidence on who uses derivatives and why. I finally address the issue of
the impact of derivatives on systemic risks. I conclude that even though some
serious dangers are associated with derivatives, they have made us better off and will
keep doing so.

What are Derivatives?

Derivatives come in different flavors: plain vanilla and exotic. Plain vanilla
includes contracts to buy or sell for future delivery, called forward and futures
contracts; contracts that involve an option to buy or sell at a fixed price sometime
in the future, called options; and combinations of forward, futures and option
contracts. Exotic derivatives are everything else in the derivatives world.

Forward Contracts
A forward contract obligates one party to buy the underlying at a fixed price
at a certain time in the future, called “maturity,” from a counterparty who is
obligated to sell the underlying at that fixed price. Consider a U.S. exporter who
expects to receive €100 million in six months. Suppose that the price of the euro
is $1.20 now. If the price of the euro falls by 10 percent over the next six months,
the exporter loses $12 million. By selling euros forward, the exporter locks in the
current forward rate (if the forward rate is $1.18, the exporter receives $118 million
at maturity). Financial hedging involves taking a financial position to reduce one’s
exposure or sensitivity to a risk; hedging is perfect when all exposure to the risk is
eliminated through the financial position. In our example, the financial position is
a forward contract, the risk is the euro, the exposure is €100 million in six months,
and the exposure to the euro is perfectly hedged with the forward contract. Since
no money changes hands when the exporter buys euros forward, the market value
of the forward contract must be zero when initiated, since otherwise the exporter
would get something for nothing.

Options
Although options can be written on any underlying, let’s use options on
common stock as an example. A call (put) option on a stock gives its holder the right
to buy (sell) a fixed number of shares at a given price at some future date.1 The
specified price is called the exercise price. Whoever sells an option at inception of the
contract is called the option writer. When the holder of an option takes advantage
of her right, she is said to “exercise it.” An option holder who cannot gain from

1
A “European” option gives the right to buy the stock at maturity only, whereas an “American” option
gives that right at or before maturity.
 René M. Stulz 175

exercising an option before expiration does not exercise it. The purchase price of
an option is called the option premium.
Options enable their holders to lever their resources while at the same time
limiting their risk. Suppose an investor, Smith, believes that the current price of $50
for Upside Inc. common stock is too low. Let’s assume that the premium on a call
option that gives the right to buy 100 shares at $50 per share is $10 per share. By
investing $1,000, Smith can buy call options to purchase 100 shares. If she does so,
she will gain from stock price increases as if she had invested in 100 shares, even
though she invests only an amount equal to the value of 20 shares. With only $1,000
to invest, Smith could borrow $4,000 to buy 100 shares. At maturity, she would then
have to repay the loan. The gain made upon exercising the option is therefore
similar to the gain from a levered position in the stock—a position consisting of
purchasing shares with one’s own money and some borrowed money. However, if
Smith borrows, she could lose up to $5,000 plus interest due on the loan if the stock
price falls to zero. With the call option, she can lose at most $1,000, which she does
if the stock price does not rise above $50.

Swaps
Suppose that you have an adjustable-rate mortgage with principal of $200,000
and current payments of $10,000 per year. If interest rates double, your payments
would increase dramatically. You could eliminate this risk by refinancing your
mortgage and getting a fixed-rate mortgage, but the transactions costs could be
high. A swap contract would be an alternative solution that would not entail
renegotiating the mortgage contract. You would agree to make payments to a
counterparty, say a bank, equal to a fixed interest rate applied to $200,000. In
exchange, the bank would pay you a floating rate applied to $200,000. With this
interest rate swap, you would use the floating-rate payments received from the bank
to make your mortgage payments. The only payments you would make out of your
own pocket would be the fixed interest payments to the bank, as if you had a
fixed-rate mortgage. Therefore, a doubling of interest rates would no longer affect
your mortgage payments.
A swap is a contract to exchange cash flows over the life of the contract. In the
example, you exchange cash flows of floating-rate debt for cash flows of fixed-rate
debt. The principal used to compute the cash flows, called the notional amount, is
not exchanged. The notional amount for swaps is generally much higher than
$200,000. There are swaps involving exchange rates, different types of floating
interest rates, equities, electricity and so on.
A swap is really just a portfolio of forward contracts. For example, imagine a
forward contract that pays your mortgage payment in ten years in exchange for the
forward price. This forward contract would hedge one interest rate payment. If you
entered such forward contracts for each future interest payment date, you would
have the equivalent of a swap. Consequently, like forward contracts, the market’s
assessment of the present value of the cash flows of a swap is zero at initiation of the
contract.
176 Journal of Economic Perspectives

Exotics
An exotic derivative is a derivative that cannot be created by putting together
option and forward contracts. Instead, the payoff of exotics is a complicated
function of one or many underlyings. When Procter and Gamble lost $160 million
on derivatives in 1994, the main culprit was an exotic swap. The amounts P&G had
to pay on the swap depended on the five-year Treasury note yield and the price of
the 30-year Treasury bond. Another example of an exotic derivative is a binary
option, which pays a fixed amount if some condition is met. For instance, a binary
option might pay $10 million if before a given future date one of the three largest
banks has defaulted on its debt.

The Pricing of Derivatives

Derivatives are typically priced assuming that there are no frictions in financial
markets. With that assumption (and, often, some other more technical assump-
tions), one can find a portfolio strategy that does not use the derivative and only
requires an initial investment such that the portfolio pays the same as the derivative
at maturity. The portfolio is called a replicating portfolio. The derivative must be
worth the same as the replicating portfolio if financial markets are frictionless, since
otherwise there is an opportunity to make a risk-free profit (the term of art is an
arbitrage opportunity).
Consider the euro forward contract described earlier. At maturity, the ex-
porter has to pay €100 million and receives $118 million. A replicating portfolio can
be constructed as follows: borrow the present value of €100 million and invest the
present value of the payment to be made on the forward contract, $118 million, in
Treasury bills that mature when the forward contract matures. At maturity, you
have $118 million dollars and have to pay back the borrowed euros plus interest,
which amounts to €100 million. The forward contract must be priced so that the
exporter is indifferent between using the forward contract or the replicating
portfolio. If one approach is cheaper than the other, any investor could make
money for sure by buying dollars against euros using the cheap approach and
selling dollars against euros using the expensive approach.
The value of a forward contract changes over time. If the euro appreciates
unexpectedly by 10 percent, the replicating portfolio makes a loss: the present
value of the euro debt of the portfolio increases unexpectedly, but the value of the
Treasury bills does not increase commensurately. Since the replicating portfolio
has the same payoff as the forward contract, the loss means that the value of the
forward contract has become negative.
The replicating portfolio strategy is trickier to devise and implement for
options. Consider the option to buy 100 shares of Upside at $50 per share. If the
price of the stock exceeds $50 at maturity, the value of the option is 100 times the
difference between the value of the underlying and $50; otherwise, the option is
worth nothing. The replicating portfolio must therefore be worth zero at maturity
 Should We Fear Derivatives? 177

if the stock price is less than $50 and 100 times the difference between the stock
price and $50 otherwise. At inception of the replicating strategy, one must purchase
shares partly with borrowed money. However, the number of shares held has to
increase as the stock price increases because it becomes more likely that the option
holder will exercise, and it has to fall as the stock price falls since the option
becomes more likely to expire worthless. In the former case, the shares acquired
are financed with more borrowing; in the latter case, the proceeds from selling
shares are used to pay back money borrowed. Fischer Black and Myron Scholes
(1973), in their path-breaking work, provide a mathematical solution for the option
price, the Black-Scholes formula, and for the number of shares held in the
replicating portfolio at any time during the life of the option.

Derivatives Markets and their Growth

Derivatives have been traded for centuries. Some of the earliest derivatives
markets were the market for options on tulip bulbs in seventeenth-century Holland
and the futures market for rice in Japan in the same century. But derivatives
markets were small until the 1970s, when economic conditions and developments
in the pricing of derivatives laid the basis for the spectacular growth in derivatives
markets we have experienced since then. The volatility of interest rates and ex-
change rates increased sharply in the 1970s, making it imperative for firms and
investors to find ways to hedge these risks. Other changes in the economic envi-
ronment, such as the deregulation of several industries and the spectacular growth
in international trade and finance, increased the demand for financial products to
manage risk further.
Development of the Black-Scholes (1973) formula in the early 1970s changed
the trading of derivatives forever. Almost immediately, the approach used by Black
and Scholes to price options together with critical contributions from Merton
(1973) was found useful to price, evaluate the risk of and hedge most derivatives,
plain vanilla or exotic. Financial engineers could even invent new instruments and
find their value with the Black-Merton-Scholes pricing method. The growing speed
and power of computers made it easier to price derivatives using that method.
Until the 1970s, the trading of derivatives took the form mostly of option,
forward and futures contracts. Futures contracts are similar to forward contracts,
but they are standardized contracts that trade on exchanges. Except for futures
contracts on commodities, the trading of derivatives was done over the counter
(OTC trading), which means that two parties agree on a trade without meeting
through an organized exchange. In 1972, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange started
trading futures contracts on currencies. The Chicago Board Options Exchange,
where stock options are traded, was founded in 1973. In the late 1970s and early
1980s, the swaps market took off. Swaps and exotic derivatives, whose growth
started in the 1980s, are traded over the counter. So are forward contracts.
Estimating the size of the OTC derivatives markets is difficult. After all, an
178 Journal of Economic Perspectives

over-the-counter market is decentralized and unregulated, and the parties are not
required to report their transactions. However, an OTC derivatives trade typically
involves a bank or a broker, and so it is possible to estimate the size of the OTC
market for derivatives by surveying financial firms. The Bank for International
Settlements (BIS) has conducted such surveys of financial firms since 1998. It
surveys 60 major derivatives dealers and eliminates double counting among the
reporting institutions.
The BIS reports the size of the OTC derivatives market by adding up the
notional amounts of outstanding derivatives. In June 2003, the total notional
amount of derivatives was $169.7 trillion. The notional amount represents a proxy
for the value of the underlyings against which claims are traded in the derivatives
markets. For example, the euro forward contract we discussed earlier has a notional
value of $118 million, and the interest rate swap had a notional amount of
$200,000. Interest rate swaps represent 56 percent of the derivatives market.
The derivatives market has expanded dramatically in recent years. According
to an earlier BIS survey, outstanding OTC derivatives had a total notional amount
of $94 trillion in June 2000, which implies that the size of the OTC derivatives
market increased by more than 80 percent from 2000 to 2003. The International
Swap and Derivatives Association (ISDA), a trade association, provides a longer
time series for notional amounts of currency swaps, interest rate swaps and interest
rate options. In 1987, the notional amount outstanding of these instruments was
$865 billion, and in 2003 it was $124 trillion. By this measure, this market grew at
the rate of 36 percent per year over 16 years.
The market for exchange-traded derivatives is not as large as the OTC market.
The Bank for International Settlements, surveying organized derivatives markets
across the world, reports that the notional amount of futures contracts was
$13.9 trillion in the middle of 2003, and the notional amount of options was
$24.3 trillion. The total market for exchange-traded derivatives is therefore
$38.2 trillion. The earliest data available for exchange-traded derivatives is for
December 1986, when the total notional amount outstanding was $615.7 billion.
The market for exchange-traded derivatives is therefore 61 times in 2003 what it was
in 1986, corresponding to an annual growth rate of 27 percent.
Adding up the OTC market and the exchanges, the notional amount of
derivatives was $208 trillion at the end of June 2003. To put this number in
perspective, the capitalization of the markets for corporate debt and equity in the
world was $31 trillion at the end of 2003.
Using notional amounts, the size of the derivatives market is huge, but the
estimate has to be treated with care. On the one hand, the total is artificially
inflated because of the way derivatives contracts are often closed. Suppose that
Widget Inc. wants to close a swap contract with JP Morgan Chase, where it makes
floating rate payments and receives fixed rate payments. The best way for Widget
Inc. to close that contract is to call up a number of banks and find out the most
advantageous swap contract with the same terms where it pays a fixed rate and
receives a floating rate. After entering the second contract, the floating payments
 René M. Stulz 179

it receives match the floating payments it has to make, so that it is no longer

affected by the swap contract with JP Morgan Chase. As Widget Inc. effectively
closed its contract with JP Morgan Chase, it increased the notional amount of the
derivatives markets by the notional amount of the new swap into which it had
entered! On the other hand, the BIS estimate has a downward bias because it misses
a number of derivatives contracts. For example, it misses derivatives where no
counterparty is a reporting institution included in the survey—although the quan-
tity of derivatives missed because of this reason should be small. More important,
the survey ignores securities sold in the markets that are claims on underlying assets
or include such claims, and hence are also derivative assets. Consider a mortgage
banker. As its portfolio of mortgages grows, it might put the mortgages in a trust
and issue securities against the assets of the trust. This process is called securitiza-
tion. There are trillions of dollars of securitized mortgages.
Another way to look at the size of the derivatives market, other than its
notional size, is as follows: Suppose that the whole world had to write off all
derivatives contracts. For each swap contract, one party would write off an asset, the
positive value of the contract at that time, and the counterparty would write off a
liability. Now, just add up the positive value of all contracts at that time. By this
measure, the aggregate value of OTC derivatives outstanding in June 2003 was
$7.9 trillion, according to the BIS. This amount is large, but not compared to the
notional amount of contracts outstanding.
Yet another way to look at the size of the derivatives markets is to measure how
much trading takes place. Information on trading volume is regularly available for
only some derivatives. According to the Bank for International Settlements, finan-
cial futures contract positions for $624 trillion in notional value changed hands in
2003. The BIS conducts triennial surveys of foreign exchange and derivatives
markets. The most recent survey, for April 2001, reported an average daily trading
volume of $489 billion for interest rate derivatives in the OTC derivatives market.
By comparison, the estimate for April 1995 was $151 billion.

The Benefits of Derivatives

We saw that derivatives are priced by constructing a replicating portfolio. This

suggests that derivatives are redundant assets. So why the fuss? If it is true that
everybody can replicate derivatives perfectly, banning derivatives would change
nothing—as long as the disclosure requirements for replicating portfolios are the
same as for derivatives. Instead of buying a call option on Upside Inc., Smith would
simply manufacture the option on her own. The assumption of pricing models that
financial markets are frictionless is a powerful simplifying assumption. The reason
it typically makes sense to use that assumption is that firms with large trading
operations can trade often enough and cheaply enough to manage replicating
portfolios well enough for derivatives on underlyings trading in very liquid markets.
180 Journal of Economic Perspectives

These firms can also make markets in derivatives so that they match buyers and
sellers. When they do so, they do not have to hedge.
But for individuals and nonfinancial firms, derivatives are almost never redun-
dant assets. There are three reasons for this. First, individuals and nonfinancial
firms face much higher trading costs than the most efficient financial institutions.
In general, for most investors and firms, replicating closely the payoff of a derivative
such as a call option will be prohibitively expensive. Second, for derivatives that
include option features, the replicating portfolio strategy typically requires trades
to be made whenever the price of the underlying changes. Otherwise, the repli-
cating portfolio works only approximately. Third, identifying the correct replicat-
ing strategy is often a problem. For instance, the strategy may differ depending on
the dynamics of the price of the underlying, so that estimation error may affect the
performance of the replicating strategy and make that approach risky. Because of
these issues, individuals and firms will be willing to pay financial institutions to
provide them with a derivative instead of attempting to manufacture it on their
own.
The main gain from derivatives is therefore to permit individuals and firms to
achieve payoffs that they would not be able to achieve without derivatives or could
only achieve at much greater cost. Because individuals and firms could not obtain
the payoffs of derivatives efficiently by manufacturing them on their own, deriva-
tives make markets more complete—that is, they make it possible to hedge risks
that otherwise would be unhedgeable—for these individuals and firms. When
individuals and firms can manage risk better, risks are born by those who are in the
best position to bear them and firms and individuals can take on riskier but more
profitable projects by hedging those risks that can be hedged. As a result, the
economy is more productive and welfare is higher.
A second important benefit from derivatives is that they can make underlying
markets more efficient. For example, derivatives markets produce information. In
a number of countries, the only reliable information about long-term interest rates
is obtained from swaps because the swaps market is more liquid and more active
than the bond market. In addition, derivatives enable investors to trade on infor-
mation that otherwise might be prohibitively expensive to trade on. For instance,
short sales of stocks are often difficult to implement. This slows down the speed
with which adverse information is incorporated in stock prices and makes markets
less efficient. With puts, investors can more easily take advantage of adverse
information about stock prices.
Though derivatives can make underlying markets more efficient, observers
have long been concerned that they can also disrupt markets because they make it
easier to build speculative positions. Overall, there does not seem to be compelling
evidence at this time that the introduction of derivatives trading on an underlying
increases permanently the volatility of the return of the underlying. For instance,
Conrad (1989) finds that the introduction of option trading on a stock reduces the
volatility of the underlying stock, and Bollen (1998) finds no effect.
 Should We Fear Derivatives? 181

Who Uses Derivatives and Why?

I now turn to some evidence on who uses derivatives and why.2 I first look at
nonfinancial firms, then financial firms, and I conclude with individuals.

Nonfinancial Firms
The Bank of International Settlements survey reports that OTC foreign ex-
change contracts for a notional amount of $5 trillion and OTC interest rate
contracts for a notional amount of $15 trillion had nonfinancial firms as counter-
parties. The most comprehensive study of the use of derivatives by nonfinancial
firms is by Bartram, Brown and Fehle (2004), who examine 7,292 nonfinancial
firms from 48 countries using annual reports published in 2000 –2001. They find
that 59.8 percent of firms use derivatives. Since 64 percent of U.S. firms use
derivatives, they are slightly more likely to use derivatives than are firms from other
countries. The most frequently used derivatives are foreign exchange derivatives,
which are used by 43.6 percent of firms. Interest rate derivatives are used by
32.5 percent of firms and commodity derivatives by 10 percent. Swaps and forwards
are used much more frequently than options.
The Bartram, Brown and Fehle (2004) study also provides evidence on why
firms use derivatives. The firms that use foreign currency derivatives have foreign
currency transactions, and firms that use interest rate derivatives have higher
leverage. They find further that firms with higher leverage and lower balance sheet
liquidity are more likely to use derivatives to hedge, which is consistent with a body
of evidence that firms with higher costs of financial distress are more likely to
hedge. (However, they also find that more profitable firms are more likely to
hedge, which runs counter to the financial distress motivation for hedging.)
If firms use derivatives to hedge, the stock return volatility of firms and the
stock return exposure to market risks should fall after they start using derivatives.
In finance, the exposure or sensitivity of a stock to a market risk, say the yen-dollar
exchange rate, is typically measured as the regression coefficient on the rate of
change of the yen-dollar exchange rate in a regression of the return of the stock on
the return of the stock market and the rate of change of the yen-dollar exchange
rate. Guay (1999) shows that when firms start using derivatives, their stock return
volatility falls by 5 percent, their interest rate exposure falls by 22 percent, and their
foreign exchange exposure falls by 11 percent. Clearly, firms do use derivatives for
hedging, although if firms hedged systematically, they would use derivatives much
more (Guay and Kothari, 2003).
Firms use derivatives for other reasons, too. In a survey by Bodnar, Hayt,
Marston and Smithson (1995, p. 108), 28 percent of the firms state that minimizing
accounting earnings volatility is their primary motivation for using derivatives.
Although theoretical research has paid little attention to the role of derivatives in

2
Stulz (2003) provides a detailed analysis of the main economic theories of risk management by firms.
182 Journal of Economic Perspectives

smoothing earnings, there is empirical evidence that firms with a smoother flow of
income are valued more (Barth, Elliott and Finn, 1999). There also exists evidence
showing that firms use derivatives to reduce the present value of their tax liabilities
(Graham and Rogers, 2002). The nature of management compensation affects the
extent to which firms hedge. In general, firms for which options are a more
important component of managerial compensation are less likely to hedge (Rogers,
2002; Tufano, 1996). After all, in many (but not all) situations, managers who hold
options benefit from increases in volatility, since their options will be worth more
if the stock price rises, but the option will never be worth less than zero if the stock
price falls. Finally, firms sometimes use derivatives to speculate.
Recent papers investigate whether using derivatives increases firm value. This
issue is tricky, since derivatives’ use could proxy for firm characteristics like astute
management that are associated with higher firm value. Nevertheless, Allayannis
and Weston (2001) and Bartram, Brown and Fehle (2003) use Tobin’s q as a
measure of firm valuation and show that firms that use derivatives have a higher
Tobin’s q when controlling for a wide range of firm characteristics. These results
should be treated with caution, but, according to these papers, the extent to which
firms using derivatives are worth more varies, depending on the specification, from
4 percent to 12 percent.

Financial Firms
Banks and investment banks make markets in derivatives, but they also take
positions in derivatives to manage risk. In the third quarter of 2003, the banks with
the 25 largest derivatives portfolios held 96.6 percent of the derivatives for trading
purposes and 3.4 percent for risk management needs (Office of the Controller of
the Currency, Bank Derivatives Report, Third Quarter 2003).
Purnanandam (2003) investigates banks’ use of derivatives for risk manage-
ment. He concludes that larger banks are more likely to use derivatives for risk
management and that banks that use derivatives for that purpose do so to reduce
the probability of financial distress.

Individuals
Little is known about derivatives use by individuals. The evidence there is,
though, points to the fact that individuals tend to leave money on the table when
faced with exercise decisions. Mortgages have an embedded option—a homeowner
has the option to prepay the mortgage, which is a valuable right. Typically,
mortgage holders exercise this option later than can be justified by theoretical
models of option pricing (Green and Lacour-Little, 1998). Perhaps even more
striking is the result in Poteshman and Serbin (2003) that individual investors
exercise stock options too early, while traders in large investment houses do not.
Shiller (2003) makes an important point concerning the use of derivatives by
individuals, which is that the opportunities for individuals to hedge risks that matter
to them with derivatives are extremely limited. For instance, individuals cannot
 René M. Stulz 183

hedge through derivatives the risks associated with the value of their house or the
value of their human capital.

The Risks of Derivatives at the Firm Level

In this section, I consider the risks of derivatives for the firms that use them. In
the following section, I turn to the risks they pose for financial institutions and the
financial system.

How Well Do We Know What a Derivative is Worth?

Derivatives that trade in liquid markets can always be bought or sold at the
market price, so that models are not required to value them. Valuation issues are
much more complex when trading is illiquid, and available prices, if any, do not
offer a good measure of the price at which a derivative can be traded. In this case,
models have to be brought to bear to value derivatives—a procedure called mark-
ing them to market. In the words of a skeptical Warren Buffett (2003): “In extreme
cases, mark-to-model degenerates into what I would call mark-to-myth.” This may
help explain why Buffett, at a speech at the Harvard Business School, said that his
problems with derivatives were with OTC derivatives and not exchange-traded
derivatives.
Suppose you want to value a stock option using the Black-Scholes (1973)
formula. The Black-Scholes formula assumes: 1) markets have no frictions; 2) the
stock price is lognormally distributed; 3) interest rates are fixed; and 4) trading is
possible all the time. With these assumptions, the stock price moves smoothly over
time—it never jumps. Further, the distribution of the stock return has a constant
volatility. In the real world, departures from these assumptions are significant. One
tell-tale sign that the model does not entirely hold is that if derivatives are priced
by arbitrage, the supply for derivatives would be perfectly elastic at the theoretical
price. This is not the case. Put options on the S&P 500 stock index, which can be
used to insure portfolios (by assuring the right to sell at a certain price in the future
even if the market declines below that level), become more expensive as demand
increases (Bollen and Whaley, 2004). Though the shortcomings of the Black-
Scholes formula are widely recognized, there is no general agreement on a better
model.
Even relatively simple derivatives contracts can be misvalued substantially.
Chase Manhattan had egg on its face when it discovered in 1999 that a foreign
exchange trader had misvalued forward contracts to the tune of $60 million
(Silverman, 1999). In January 2004, the National Australian Bank reported cur-
rency option losses in excess of $360 million Australian dollars (approximately
$280 million in U.S. dollars) that were attributed to rogue traders and risk man-
agement failures and involved incorrect valuations and misreporting. It is much
harder to value more complicated derivatives.
Two interesting studies show substantial disagreement among experts on the
184 Journal of Economic Perspectives

value of derivatives. The Bank of England asked dealers to value a number of

different derivatives and found that while the dealers had similar numbers for the
most actively traded derivatives, they were sometimes far apart for more complicated
derivatives (Walwyn and Byres, 1997). Bernardo and Cornell (1997) had access to data
for an auction of 32 mortgage derivatives securities. The average percentage by which
the highest bid price exceeded the lowest bid price was 63 percent.
These issues appear even tougher when you remember that large organizations
are valuing sometimes thousands of derivatives, some of which may be quite exotic.
Regardless of the practical difficulties, current U.S. accounting rules, specified in
Statement #133 issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in June
1998, require firms to mark to market derivatives positions on their balance sheet.
Before Statement #133, derivatives that did not require an upfront payment (for
instance, swaps) were off-balance sheet items. This meant that there was a considerable
difference, from an accounting and disclosure perspective, between holding the de-
rivative and its replicating portfolio; the replicating portfolio would be on the balance
sheet, but not the derivative. This difference has now disappeared.

How Liquid are Derivatives Markets?

Part of the reason Warren Buffett (2003) was discussing derivatives in the 2002
annual report of Berkshire Hathaway is that he had bought a reinsurance company,
General Re, with a derivatives dealer subsidiary. He did not want that subsidiary, but
was unable to sell it at his desired price. He then decided to close the subsidiary and
get out of the derivatives contracts. But he explains that “closing down a derivatives
business is easier said than done. It will be a great many years before we are totally
out of this operation (though we reduce our exposure daily). In fact, the reinsur-
ance and derivatives businesses are similar: Like Hell, both are easy to enter and
almost impossible to exit.”
If a firm buys a commonly traded plain vanilla derivative—say, a put option on
the euro with maturity and exercise price common in the marketplace—it is
generally easy to find a buyer for this derivative. However, it can be harder to
get out of long maturity contracts and out of complicated derivatives. First, it is
much more likely that there is risk involved in the replicating strategy for such
derivatives—there may be uncertainty about the model to use and/or the inputs to
use. Second, a complicated derivative only appeals to a small number of counter-
parties who both want that particular set of risk characteristics and are confident
that they understand what they are receiving.

Transparency and Reliability of Accounting Statements

Enron had a huge portfolio of derivatives, including many contracts with
extremely long maturities.3 For example, consider a 30-year swap contract where
Enron delivers gas at regular intervals and receives fixed amounts of cash over time.

3
For a discussion of Enron’s situation in this journal, see the “Symposium on Enron and Conflict of
Interest” in the Spring 2003 issue.
 Should We Fear Derivatives? 185

The value of this contract has to be marked to market each quarter for accounting
purposes. However, it can be tempting to tweak assumptions—say, about the
growth in the storage cost of gas over the next 30 years—in a way that has a
substantial impact on present profits. Warren Buffett (2003) correctly points out:
“As a general rule, contracts involving multiple reference items and distant settle-
ment dates increase the opportunities for counterparties to use fanciful assump-
tions.” Enron was not reluctant to tweak assumptions that way. Further, the ac-
counting treatment of derivatives is sufficiently complex that canny use of
derivatives can decrease or increase reported earnings. Freddie Mac, a corporation
that guarantees and securitizes mortgages, got in trouble in 2003 because it used
derivatives to hide billions of dollars of profits to achieve a smoother earnings path.
Though concerns of disclosures about derivatives positions have increased, the
information disclosed typically focuses on the stand-alone risks of derivatives, rather
than on how derivatives are used. If a firm uses derivatives to hedge, it could take
on a large amount of derivatives risk, yet become less risky as a result. Although
disclosure requirements for derivatives are not much help in seeing how they are
used, some firms do report the impact of their hedging activities on various risks.
Another problem is that it is impossible for a firm to describe all the details of its
derivatives risks. For example, Enron had complicated derivatives with “credit
rating triggers,” which require payments to be made (or the derivatives positions to
be closed) if the firm’s credit rating falls below a trigger level. Once Enron’s credit
rating fell and these triggers were activated, the firm could no longer survive
because the payments it owed were too large.

Does Derivatives Trading Create Perverse Incentives?

The sale of a derivative produces revenue. A wise derivative trading firm will
typically proceed to hedge the derivative that it has sold. But placing a value on the
derivative that is sold and on the corresponding hedge can be difficult and subject
to judgment when the derivative is not traded in a very liquid market. Senior
management does not always have strong incentives to side with risk managers who
want to value derivatives conservatively against traders who prefer a more aggressive
approach. When a conservative valuation of derivatives would cause a firm to make
a loss, leading the stock price to fall and rendering executives’ stock options
worthless, top executives may not support a conservative risk manager.
Derivatives trading does not require much cash investment. For instance, swaps
have no value at initiation, so that a firm with a good credit rating can build a
portfolio of swaps without writing checks, using its good credit as collateral. As a
result, derivatives trading can look very profitable when its revenue is compared to
the required cash investment. Yet derivatives trading generates revenue by assum-
ing additional risks. Derivatives may look profitable using traditional accounting,
but when the cost associated with the increase in risk is properly taken into account,
they may not be. Proper evaluation of the profitability of derivatives requires taking
into account the capital required to support the risks of derivatives. The major
commercial and investment banks have developed approaches that allow them to
186 Journal of Economic Perspectives

do that. Other firms, though, are more likely to ignore the cost associated with the
increase in risk brought about by derivatives trading, which leads them to overstate
its profitability.

Do Firms Know the Risks Involved in the Derivatives They Use?

In 1994, a firm in Cincinnati, Gibson Greetings, lost one year’s profits from its
operations on derivatives. One of its derivatives contracts worked like this: A swap
specified that starting on April 5, 1993, and until October 5, 1997, Gibson would
pay Bankers Trust six-month LIBOR (the London Interbank Offering Rate, a
commonly used interest rate) squared divided by 6 percent times $30 million, and
Bankers Trust would pay Gibson 5.50 percent times $30 million. Such transactions
have raised the concern that some parties involved in exotic contracts do not fully
understand the risks they are taking.
Since 1994, regular users of derivatives have made considerable progress in
measuring the risks of derivatives portfolios. The two most popular approaches are
a risk measure called value-at-risk (or VaR) and stress tests (Stulz, 2003). Value-at-
risk is a quantile of the distribution of the change in value of the portfolio over a
day. For instance, a 5 percent value-at-risk of $100 million for a bank means that
there is a 5 percent chance the bank will lose $100 million or more. With a stress
test, the firm computes the value of its derivatives portfolio using scenarios of
interest. For instance, it might compute the value of its portfolio if the Russian crisis
events of 1998 were to occur again. Many firms with large portfolios of derivatives
report their value-at-risk and may also report the outcomes of various stress tests.
With these tools, firms that use derivatives regularly know their risks reasonably
well. But these measurement tools do not always work well; for example, during the
Russian crisis, banks exceeded their value-at-risk more than they theoretically
should have.

Who Gets Hurt with Derivatives Losses?

Derivatives are useful for firms, but at times firms have reported large deriva-
tives losses. Who gets hurt by these losses? Often, a loss associated with a derivative
is the flip side of a large gain on the hedged exposure. When a hedge is designed
to eliminate all the risk associated with an exposure, it necessarily follows that the
hedge will make a loss when the hedged exposure is profitable. For instance, in our
example of the exporter hedging a euro exposure, the forward contract makes a
loss when the euro appreciates unexpectedly. However, sometimes derivatives
losses are not the random byproducts of well-conceived hedges, but the outcomes
of poorly conceived derivatives positions. With a derivative, somebody’s loss is
somebody else’s gain. Thus, for a derivatives’ loss to create a social loss, there must
be deadweight costs. In many cases, the deadweight costs of derivatives losses are
small or nonexistent. Sometimes they are not. Derivatives losses can lead to finan-
cial distress at the firm level and, as discussed in the next section, can in exceptional
circumstances have more pervasive effects on the economy. However, firms have
 René M. Stulz 187

learned a lot about how to use derivatives, making foolish uses of derivatives less
likely and productive uses more frequent.

Derivatives and Systemic Risks

Would the failure of an especially large derivatives dealer pose a systemic risk
that could spread throughout the financial system? Could the collapse of a deriv-
atives user with large positions have systemic implications? The collapse of the
hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management provides a case study.

The Derivatives Risks of Financial Institutions

In the third quarter of 2003, insured commercial banks in the United States
had derivatives positions with a total notional amount of $67.1 trillion (OCC Bank
Derivatives Report, Third Quarter 2003). There were 575 commercial banks with
derivatives positions, but 96 percent of the total notional amount was held by seven
banks.
Banks generally report the “market risk” of their trading positions. By market
risk, they mean the risk associated with changes in financial prices and rates. For
instance, JP Morgan Chase reported a 1 percent value-at-risk of $111 million on
December 31, 2002, which means that there was a 1 percent chance that JP Morgan
Chase would make a one-day loss on its trading portfolio in excess of $111 million.
Of course, if the bank started actually making a parade of such losses, it would cut
down its risk. For comparison, the trading revenue of JP Morgan Chase in 2002 was
$2.5 billion, and total revenue was $29.6 billion. Stockholders’ equity was
$41 billion. By any standard, these risks seem manageable. Banks also manage to
control the risk of their trading operations fairly well; they are generally successful
in maintaining their value-at-risk within reasonably tight bands over time.
A large bank might make significant losses if one or several of its large
derivatives counterparties default. However, participants in financial markets have
strong incentives to control counterparty risk and are doing so. The International
Swap and Derivatives Association reports that 65 percent of plain vanilla interest
rate swaps were collateralized in 2001. Parties also put triggers in derivatives
contracts, forcing the counterparty to post more collateral as it becomes less
creditworthy. We saw that the gross market value of over-the-counter derivatives is
$7.9 trillion. The BIS also produces a different number called gross credit expo-
sure, estimated at $1.75 trillion, which measures the amount that would be lost after
taking into account the credit protections, such as collateral, incorporated in
derivatives contracts and shows that these protections play a large role in practice.
In the United States, the Office of the Controller of the Currency provides
information on credit losses on derivatives. Charge-offs for commercial banks from
derivatives are small compared to charge-offs from commercial loans.
Is it possible that the risks of derivatives are substantially underestimated? Two
issues are worth considering. First, if large losses at the level of one firm would
188 Journal of Economic Perspectives

impose large costs on the financial system, firms have little incentives to take these
externalities into account on their own. Thus, firms will pay less attention to
extreme tail risks than is probably socially optimal. Second, though existing risk
measures capture most risks, they don’t capture risks we do not know matter. In
1998, liquidity risk—the risk associated with the cost of selling a position quickly
rather than over time—was crucially important, but it was not included in most
models. Now, models pay more attention to this risk. While it is impossible to
answer the question of whether unknown risks are large, the conventional measures
suggest that no large bank or investment bank is seriously at risk because of its
derivatives holdings.

What Would Happen if a Major Dealer or User of Derivatives Collapsed?

Bankruptcy law contains an “automatic stay” provision that prevents creditors
from requiring immediate payment and makes it possible for the claims of creditors
to be resolved in an orderly fashion. Interest rate swaps and some other derivatives
are exempted from this “automatic stay.” Instead, the parties to a swap contract use
a master agreement that specifies how termination payments are determined in the
event that a party defaults. Without the exemption from the automatic stay, default
on derivatives contracts would present a considerable problem since counterparties
might have to wait, perhaps for years, for their claims to be adjudicated, leaving
them with mostly unhedgeable risks.
Consider a bank that experiences a default on a derivatives contract. It chooses
to ask for termination of the contract and is due a payment equal to the market
value of its position at termination. If the position was hedged, the bank has only
the hedge on its books after the default without having the contract it was trying to
hedge. The bank’s risk has increased, and it may not have received cash payments
that were promised. The bank may then lack the liquidity to make payments it owes,
which leads to further problems. Under normal circumstances, markets are suffi-
ciently liquid that the bank can quickly eliminate the risk created by the default for
a wide range of derivatives. As long as exposures to single counterparties are small
and well-controlled, a default is unlikely to create a major problem for a bank as
long as markets are reasonably liquid.
The situation may be more dire if the default occurs in a period of economic
turmoil. In that case, derivatives markets as well as markets for underlyings can lose
liquidity, so that it might become harder to offset, hedge or replace contracts. A
bank may suddenly end up with more risk than intended precisely when other
banks are already trying to reduce their risk. If many banks are measuring risk in
similar ways, and all are trying to reduce risk, they all end up stuck with their risks
because there is only a limited market for the positions they are trying to sell. In
such a situation, the Federal Reserve would have to step in to provide liquidity.
Given the central role of Treasury bills and bonds in dynamic hedging, the Fed may
also have to intervene actively to settle down the Treasury market.
 Should We Fear Derivatives? 189

Crash Fears: The LTCM Collapse

The collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) is
often given as an example of a crisis linked to derivatives that could perhaps have
led to a meltdown of the financial system.4 At the end of July 1998, LTCM held
assets worth $125 billion, which were financed with about $4.1 billion of its own
capital and the rest with borrowing. It had derivatives with a total notional amount
in excess of $1 trillion. Many strategies employed by LTCM involved taking long
positions in bonds that LTCM perceived to have too high of a yield given their risk
and hedging these positions against interest rate risk with short positions in
treasuries or derivatives. However, as Russia defaulted on its debt in 1998, there was
a general “flight to safety” by investors around the globe. Interest rates on U.S.
Treasury bonds fell, but the yields on the bonds held by LTCM did not fall as much
as the interest rates on Treasuries, so that LTCM made losses on its hedges not
matched by gains on the hedged bonds.
LTCM’s losses created a vicious circle. As it made losses, it sold some assets,
which put pressure on prices, but more importantly, the market perceived that
liquidation of its positions became more likely. Traders who knew about
LTCM’s portfolio could position themselves so that they would not get hurt by
a liquidation and might even benefit from it. Their actions put pressures on
prices, reducing further the value of LTCM’s portfolio, which made liquidation
more likely and hence created incentives for a new round of trading. Further,
as prices moved against LTCM and liquidity in the markets was drying up,
counterparties were trying to maximize the collateral that they could obtain
from LTCM on their marked-to-market contracts by marking positions as much
as possible in their favor so that a forced liquidation would not hurt them in less
liquid markets. This generated further marked-to-market losses for LTCM,
imperiling its situation further. Finally, investors and banks that under normal
times would have bid for assets in the event of an LTCM liquidation were facing
problems of their own, as they had also made losses on their positions. Some
were forced to sell assets that LTCM also held, putting further pressure on
prices. By mid-September, LTCM could only avoid default by closing its posi-
tions or receiving an infusion of capital.
Closing LTCM’s positions was easier said than done, since it had more than
50,000 derivatives contracts and securities positions in markets where liquidity was
low both because of these positions and because of events not under its control. For
creditors, the most efficient solution was to avoid a fire sale, take over, inject some
cash and liquidate the portfolio slowly or find a buyer for the portfolio. A buyer
showed up—Warren Buffett with AIG and Goldman Sachs bid $4 billion for the
portfolio. Had the bid succeeded, Berkshire Hathaway would have invested
$3 billion in LTCM. The solution that prevailed was instead one where creditors
injected $3.6 billion in the fund and took control, with the LTCM partners

4
For more detailed accounts of LTCM, see Marthinsen (2004) or Stulz (2000).
190 Journal of Economic Perspectives

retaining some ownership. There was no default; there was no public bailout; the
creditors eventually took more money out than they put in. We will never know
what would have happened had LTCM defaulted and entered bankruptcy. The
fund itself was chartered not in the United States, but in the Cayman Islands, which
complicated matters. But the lesson is when a participant in the market that is large
relative to the markets gets in trouble, its difficulties may affect prices adversely,
which makes its situation worse—a fact that does not play a role in models that treat
economic agents as price takers.
Before August 1998, LTCM was able to borrow on terms almost similar to those
of major investment banks and in many ways was not different from the most
efficient investment banks. These banks have extremely high leverage. They can
pursue strategies that replicate derivatives payoffs with traded securities and bor-
rowing. So could LTCM. Had LTCM not had as easy access to derivatives, it could
have manufactured them on its own. This step would have decreased its profits
some and might have been too expensive for some types of derivatives, but LTCM
would still have been very highly levered, would still have made extremely large
losses in September 1998 and might still have collapsed then. It is difficult to say
whether the risk to the economy would have been worse or less had LTCM been
restricted from using derivatives. Its leverage would have been lower, but in
replicating derivatives on its own, it might have needed to trade more in illiquid
markets.

Conclusion

Derivatives allow firms and individuals to hedge risks and to take risks effi-
ciently. They also can create risk at the firm level, especially if a firm uses derivatives
episodically and is inexperienced in their use. For the economy as a whole, a
collapse of a large derivatives user or dealer may create systemic risks. On balance,
derivatives help make the economy more efficient.
However, neither users of derivatives nor regulators can be complacent. Firms
have to make sure that derivatives are used properly. This means that the risks of
derivatives positions have to be measured and understood. Those in charge of
taking derivatives positions must have the proper training. It also means that firms
must have well-defined policies for derivatives use. A firm’s board must know how
risk is managed within the firm and which role derivatives play. Regulators have to
make sure to monitor carefully financial firms with large derivatives positions.
Though regulators seem to be doing a good job in monitoring banks and broker-
age houses, the risks taken by insurance companies, hedge funds and government
sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not equally well
understood and monitored.
So should we fear derivatives? The answer is “no.” We should have a healthy
respect for them. We do not fear planes because they may crash and do not refuse
to board them because of that risk. Instead, we make sure that planes are as safe as
 René M. Stulz 191

it makes economic sense for them to be. The same applies to derivatives. Typically,
the losses from derivatives are localized, but the whole economy gains from the
existence of derivatives markets.

y I am grateful for the hospitality of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern

University and of the George G. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and State at the
Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago when I wrote this paper. I thank
Soehnke Bartram, Jim Hines, Robert Merton, Alan Poteshman, Andrei Shleifer, Timothy
Taylor and Michael Waldman for comments.

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