The opaque dark matter on the balance sheets

I'm beginning to understand 'credit default swaps' , what Warren Buffett called 'financial weapons of mass destruction' after reading The Monster That Ate Wall Street.

What could possibly go wrong with freeing up all that money in capital reserves to cover loans outstanding when you could buy insurance to protect against that risk?

Since credit default swaps are privately negotiated contracts between two parties and aren't regulated by the government, there's no central reporting mechanism to determine their value. That has clouded up the markets with billions of dollars' worth of opaque "dark matter," as some economists like to say. Like rogue nukes, they've proliferated around the world and now lie hiding, waiting to blow up the balance sheets of countless other financial institutions.