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But are [[synthetic equity swap]]s just an odd use case? Aren’t other, normal, swaps bilateral, and less “lendy” in nature? What about interest rate swaps? Surely ''paying'' a fixed rate while ''receiving'' a floating rate has none of the characteristics of borrowership and loanery about it?  

The first point to make here is that in the real universe of actual, non-synthetic investments, fixed or floating rate cashflows ''do not exist independently of a principal investment''. This is because they are necessarily ''income'' on a capital investment. When you put it like that, it is kind of obvious this must be true.<ref>Sure, you could sell a strip of coupons off your bond. Okay. But to do that, there first has to be a bond, and you have to buy it and ''cut it up''. Once you’ve done that, you have your disembodied interest cashflow, but you also have this weird, mutilated principal-only instrument ghosting around the market at a heavy discount to a fully-limbed equivalent, sort of like Weird Barbie or one of those intercised kids without a daemon in ''His Dark Materials''. </ref> Derivatives give us the mathematical tools to ''hypothetically'' isolate income streams from their principal and trade them as discrete instruments, but at some point, derivatives must intersect with real-world instruments, ''because that is what they are derived from''. For a customer to take on a derivative position, someone else in the linear chain of derivatives hedging its exposure must, at some point, buy a real-world hedge. And that must be financed. A rate with out principal is like a shadow without a boy.  

''But''. Income implies principal, remember. A swap can have disembodied fixed and floating rates only because, when they are set against each other, the principal investments to which they would normally be attached ''cancel each other out''. Make no mistake: those principal investments are there, but they are just ''assumed''. Taken as a given.