What do you think the repercussions will be in the international money market from the flip of people in Iran?

The market didn't even hiccup. The first thing to understand is the size of the global market. We estimate that the foreign exchange market is somewhere between $15 trillion and $30 trillion. The gross national product of the United States is about $2 trillion. So you're talking about a market that just boggles the mind.

I'll give you another number, this one on the Eurodollar market. We have a system in New York called Chips[12] , which is the mirror image of dollar trading in London. Every night when we close those books, we've cleared through $120 billion. That's not the foreign exchange total. That's just Eurodollars. The size of the market is so immense that the answer to your question is, nothing happened when Iran went down.

Now, Iran has a lot of credits outstanding, but when you say , what you mean is individual companies in Iran that have borrowed either on suppliers' credits or on banks' credits. Iran, however, has short-term assets of U.S. Treasury bills in this country that exceed their total debt. So, nobody is very excited, except some journalists who didn't look at the other side of the balance sheet.

In that whole Eastern arc, we've lost Eritreas, Afghanistan, the horn of Africa--Ethiopia. The early warning system down in Iran may cost a few minutes alert time on an ICBM. But to the world's financial markets, the change in Iran is minor.

[12] Clearing House International Payments System.