Talk about a cost decrease of that scale and I assure that you will have the attention of back office management. But these clearing facilities only cleared the obligations of performing counterparties. When contract counterparties failed to live up to their obligations, the clearinghouse had no role. Contract counterparties were left to their own devices to get performance on contract terms. In that sense, these clearinghouses were incomplete.
Completeness occurs only when contracts are cleared regardless of counterparty performance.
Note especially that this clearing facility did not prevent the propagation problem resulting from the Phillips failure. Thus, the first lesson we can learn from the Chicago experience is that clearing facilities providing only transactional economies do not prevent propagation of losses. In fact, some contemporaries criticized arrangements of this type because they facilitated larger contract positions without a corresponding improvement in risk management. These larger positions were argued to exacerbate systemic problems because they increased the capacity of thinly capitalized members to gamble for financial resurrection. What these facilities lacked was a cost-efficient mechanism for processing information.