单选题
In October 2002, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank
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a new electronic market (www.gs.com/econderivs/) for economic indices that
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substantial economic risks, such as nonfarm payroll ( a measure of job availability) and retail sales. This new market was made possible by a
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rating technology, developed by Longitude, a New York company providing software for financial markets,
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the Parimutuel Digital Call Auction. This is "digital"
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of a digital option : ie, it pays out only if an underlying index lies in a narrow, discrete range. In effect, Longitude has created a horse race, where each "horse" wins if and
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the specified index falls in a specified range. By creating horses for every possible
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of the index, and allowing people to bet
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any number of runners, the company has produced a liquid integrated electronic market for a wide array of options on economic indices.
Ten years ago it was
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impossible to make use of electronic information about home values. Now, mortgage lenders have online automated valuation models that allow them to estimate values and to
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the risk in their portfolios. This has led to a proliferation of types of home loan, some of
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have improved risk-management characteristics.
We are also beginning to see new kinds of
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for homes, which will make it possible to protect the value of
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,for most people, is the single most important
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of their wealth. The Yale University-Neighbourhood Reinvestment Corporation programme,
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last year in the city of Syracuse, in New York state, may be a model for home-equity insurance policies that
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sophisticated economic indices of house prices to define the
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of the policy. Electronic futures markets that are based on econometric indices of house prices by city, already begun by City Index and IG Index in Britain and now
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developed in the United States, will enable home-equity insurers to hedge the risks that they acquire by writing these policies.
These examples are not impressive successes yet. But they
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as early precursors of a technology that should one day help us to deal with the massive risks of inequality that
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will beset us in coming years.