I had read dozens of articles about the financial meltdown before I discovered the real whopper among so many factoids: The derivatives market amounts to more than a quadrillion dollars in obligations.

This is obviously unreal money, and one of the main problems with the recent bail-out is that they are throwing a relatively infinitesimal amount of real money (even if it's fiat currency, you can still spend it) at a vacuum in unreal money that can't conceivably be filled.

Dosing the derivatives market with $700 billion is like trying to medicate a whale with a baby aspirin.

What to do?  We have to disconnect the quadrillion dollars of obligations in unreal money from the rest of the world economy. This thing can't be cured, and and we have to find a way to kill it without letting its corpse crush the rest of us.

A quadrillion dollars in obligations is a black hole than can absorb the entire wealth of the planet Earth, if we let it. It's time to cut it lose, and let the banks which created it go down.

The real functions of private banks have already been assumed by central banks and federal treasuries all over the developed world. It would be ridiculous to bankrupt ourselves to preserve mere shells of the private banks which have already speculated themselves into irrelevance.

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There have been a lot of argument about what should be done with AIG. A lot of so-called liberals have spoken out against corporate buyouts. I say so-called because this is, by far, the most socialistic action our government has ever taken. And, by republican standards, everything socialistic is liberal, so we should all be jumping for joy.
But liberals are pissed about the golden parachutes for CEOs. However, while absurd CEO packages are a symptom of the underlying problem, they are not the cause.
Follow me after the jump.

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Lord of the Flies is all over Dailykos today as the shocking groupthink cannibalizes a new target:  Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.

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