The Derivative Trillions

In this article by a man named Mike Whitney and republished in Downside World News, you will find a long discussion written ostensibly in English that is even of a vernacular sort yet still is in an impenetrable dialect called Economics.

There are many areas of human activity whose devotees follow the ancient religious practice of cloaking their doings in all sorts of mumbo-jumbo and verbal thickets expressly designed so that the riffraff, the ordinary folk, the uninformed outsiders can have little and hopefully no inkling of what the insiders, the chosen several, are discussing. Most renditions of economics are like that.

But what is one to make especially of the following passage from the cited article?

The $800 billion current account deficit was recycled into US Treasuries and securities creating phony prosperity which the Fed knew was “unsustainable”, but they refused to fulfill their regulatory role. Instead, Greenspan and his Fed-brothers rubber-stamped every hare-brain scheme that Wall Street cooked up including the myriad complex derivatives contracts which ballooned from less than $1 trillion in 2000 to over $580 trillion today; a monstrous bubble which is large enough to send the entire global economy into a decades-long tailspin.

Excuse me. Did he say 580 trillion dollars?

I didn't know there was that much money in the world, much less available to all those guys waving their little slips of paper and shouting indecipherable orders to each other on the Stock Exchanges. If that much money is in a bubble, and in the form of "derivatives" no less, then we are all surely sinking as we speak ...without a bubble.

All I know for sure about economics is that you should always save a little something, you should never go into debt, and becoming rich is a criminal act. Beyond that why has it been necessary to build up money transaction systems that are so incredibly convoluted and beyond the clarities of the English language that periodically they lurch out of control, when they are not eternally hanging dangerously over our heads by threads thinner than that single horse hair of Damocles' Sword?

That's one of the main reasons why those History and National Geographics shows about the world suddenly rendered totally devoid of humans are so comforting. As important as we are led to believe that things like stock options, debentures, and takeovers are, it says something that neither show considers the fate of money-handling on a people-depleted planet to be worthy of the slightest mention, and instead they focus entirely on what would happen with the pets, power plants, tall buildings, dams, the oceans, and so forth. In such a world the normally supremely weighty dollar matters suddenly lose every atom of their importance, and they certainly mean nothing to all the non-human beings that then would stand to take over the inheritance of the Earth.

Such a world is so beautiful and wonderful to contemplate, compared to one controlled by institutions with addresses in the financial districts of places like New York City, London, and Shanghai, that it should make all of us thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.