We've been warned

Brooksley Born is now one of my heroes. She had the smarts to see the financial crisis coming and the balls to try to do something about it. She tried to warn us.

She stood her ground as person of principle, against Greenspan and company, but it didn't do much good. When she first became aware of the problem of unregulated financial derivatives the figures were hard to acquire, but came in at an estimated thirty-trillion dollars. Not exactly chump change, but it pales to the present. Today there is an estimated six-hundred-trillion dollars in derivatives. Yeah, that's right, about six-hundred-trillion dollars of bogus investments floating around in the global financial markets.
To put this in perspective, the global GDP is about sixty-five trillion dollars.

I can't even begin to imagine the implications of this, but I'm guessing the trillion dollar bail-out by the US Federal Government amounts to a band-aid and is serving to buy a little time to help the powers that be to try to figure a way to rectify matters. Good luck.

Do we really want a return to Depression Economics? Not me. I do tend to trust those Nobel guys though.

But hey, it's only money. Considering the state of the world, it may just be a minor problem.