"[Credit default swaps] are not securities and are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And while they perform the same function as an insur

"[Credit default swaps] are not securities and are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And while they perform the same function as an insurance policy, they are not insurance in the conventional sense, so insurance regulators do not monitor them either." This whole affair is like looking through hosed legacy code and finding comments like "I have no idea why this dirty, dirty hack works".