Template:M intro isda ISDA purpose: Difference between revisions

In this backgrounder the JC will look deeply into what is the basic point of an {{isdama }}. What does it do, why do you need one, and why can’t you just crack on and trade swaps without all this dusty paperwork?  

Now this might seem like pocket-calculator stuff to you, my seasoned veterans, but it never hurts to stop and ponder what seems to be the bleeding obvious.  

Going back to basics is bracing for the spirit. The JC encountered his first {{aies}} fully thirty years ago now — shout out the GFF — and he still finds himself discovering things he didn’t know, or having things dawn upon him. Plenty did, as he prepared this essay.

Through habit and inattention, we work ''around'' the [[easance]]s<ref>Yes, the JC made this word up. Think of it most nearly as the opposite of a nuisance.</ref> once we made to make our built environment better. What started out as a practical shortcut — the shortest possible route to market — can, through acquiescent disregard, become its own shibboleth: an ''obstacle'' on the road to transaction.  

So it is with the {{isdama}}. Once precisely a facilitation technique — an artifact for quickly tidying up and dispensing with formalities it would be laborious to repeat for every trade — it became a mountain of its own. Sure, you only need to climb it, from the bottom, once, but it has become a three-month climb. And one does not scale an ISDA master agreement the way Alex Honnold scales El Cap. There is the entire modernist machinery of the multi-national corporation campaign that you must take with you.