或许没有什么比衍生品市场更能体现失控的资本主义制度的弊端了。沃伦·巴菲特是全球最富有的投资者之一，也是伯克希尔·哈撒韦公司价值1960亿美元的投资基金的泰斗，他曾将衍生品称为"大规模杀伤性金融武器"。在2002年伯克希尔·哈撒韦致股东的年度报告中，他写道："除非衍生品合约有抵押或担保，否则其最终价值还取决于合约对手方的信用状况。与此同时，在合约结算之前，交易双方会在当期损益表中记录盈利和亏损——金额往往巨大——而实际上分文未动。衍生品合约的种类仅受人类想象力的限制（有时，似乎还受疯子想象力的限制）。"巴菲特这番话出自亲身经历：他收购了一家美国小型保险公司，该公司的账上持有一个衍生品投资组合。在对其看似虚高的估值表示怀疑之后，巴菲特下令清算该投资组合。经过数百万美元的损失，并逐一处理了670多个交易对手（交易另一端的机构）的关系，这项工作才终于完成。

Perhaps nothing characterises better the excesses of a capitalist system out of control than the Derivatives market. Warren Buffett one of the wealthiest investors in the world and doyen of Berkshire Hathaway’s $196 billion investment fund famously described derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”. In Berkshire Hathaway's annual report to shareholders in 2002, he said, “Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on the creditworthiness of the counterparties to them. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses - often huge in amount - in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands. The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen)”. Buffett was speaking from first hand experience having bought a small US Insurance company which had a derivatives portfolio on its books. After expressing scepticism over its seemingly inflated valuation, Buffett ordered the portfolio to be liquidated. After several million dollars of losses and wading through over 670 counterparty (the institution on the other side of the transaction) relationships the job was done.

衍生品市场在过去十年间几乎呈指数级增长，目前估计规模在5000亿至1万亿美元之间（即一千万亿美元）。这一规模远超全球约50万亿美元的"实体"经济。衍生品市场大部分不受监管，其主要特征是场外交易（OTC，over the counter）市场，这一市场实际上由交易各方管理，交易方主要是银行、投资公司、对冲基金及其客户，客户包括市政机构、地方议会、养老基金和富裕个人。据国际清算银行（Bank for International Settlements）统计，截至2007年12月，场外交易市场的名义价值为596万亿美元。 衍生品本质上是其价值取决于基础金融工具价值的金融工具。它们是依赖于资产表现或价格变动，而非涉及实际资产本身交易的合约，其标的包括大宗商品、股票、抵押贷款、房地产贷款、债券、利率、汇率或指数（股票市场指数、消费者价格指数等）。衍生品包括期货、远期合约、期权和互换。

The derivatives market has grown almost exponentially over the past 10 years and is now estimated at between $500 trillion and $1,000 trillion (a quadrillion) in size. A level that dwarfs the “real” economy which is estimated at $50 trillion worldwide. Most of the derivatives market is un-regulated and is characterised by the OTC (over the counter) market which is effectively managed by contracting parties to the transactions, mostly banks, investment firms, hedge funds and their customers which include municipal bodies, councils, pension funds and wealthy individuals. According to the Bank for International Settlements as of December 2007 the OTC market was worth $596 trillion in notional value. Derivatives are in essence financial instruments whose value depends on the value of underlying financial instruments. They are contracts which depend on the performance or movement in prices of assets rather than transactions involving the actual assets themselves, and include commodities, equities, mortgages, real estate loans, bonds, interest rates, exchange rates, or indices (stock market indexes, consumer price index, etc.). Derivatives include futures, forwards, options and swaps.

主要宣传的衍生品用途是降低风险。但事实上，由于所开发衍生品的性质及其与现实世界的脱节、其庞大的规模，以及它们通过复杂的交易对手关系被众多机构持有，人们不禁怀疑，它们除了是一种经过精心调校、规模惊人的赌博手段之外，是否还能带来其他任何成果。为了进一步详细说明这些交易，本文附录中介绍了三种常见的衍生品：担保债务凭证（CDO）、信用违约互换和货币互换。

The main publicised use for derivatives is to reduce risk. But in fact due to the nature of the derivatives developed and their disconnect from the real world, their sheer scale, and the fact that they are held by such a multitude of institutions via complex counterparty relations, it is questionable as to whether they are achieving anything other than a highly tuned means to gamble on a simply catastrophic scale. To amplify on to the detail of these transactions three popular forms of derivatives; CDOs, Credit Default Swaps and Currency Swaps are presented in the Appendix of this paper.