The $30 Trillion Market No One Cares About

But neither version appears to address concerns raised by people including left-wing hedge fund genius George Soros that buyers of credit default swaps should have to be required to own the debt they are insuring against. Otherwise, Soros and others argue, it is too easy for market manipulators to create a panic around a company that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is also the question of whether this legislation will ever go anywhere. Willa Cohen Bruckner, a partner at law firm Alston + Bird, believes regulators and Congress will get to it eventually, but are too worried at the moment about fixing banks and getting the economy moving again.

"Until they get the economy going again, nothing else really matters," she says, in explaining why CDS regulation was pushed to the back burner.

In the meantime, the derivatives industry, which includes large banks like JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Morgan Stanley (MS), Deutsche Bank (DB) and Credit Suisse (CS) has finally delivered on long-promised measures to bring some semblance of standardization and transparency to CDS trading. Earlier this month, derivatives trading firms created a committee that will decide how certain contracts are settled, rather than leaving it up to the two parties involved to decide.

Wall Street ingeniously called this initiative the "Big Bang," in order to make it sound like they were actually doing something important. Reporters, with our natural tendency to make everything we are writing about sound like a Really Big Deal, readily bought into this propaganda.

But the "Big Bang," is not big. It covers only a small part of the market, and it is not mandatory.