WERE CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS A FORM OF MATH ABUSE?

I was just reading another article about the financial crisis that has America, and perhaps the world in its grip. A really big number got my attention. The number, forty six trillion dollars! Yeah, that's $46,000,000,000,000!

It turns out that there is supposedly a market in a peculiar kind of insurance called credit default swaps . The market is supposedly forty six trillion dollars in size!

So how much is Manhattan Island worth? What about the United States? What is our GNP and GDP? Is it that big? Is it more or less than forty six trillion dollars? I don't know, but I'm skeptical that there were forty six trillion dollars in assets really represented by the credit default swap market.

I still don't know what a credit default swap is, especially since it is said to be a so-called "derivative". I keep on reading and hearing that no one knows what these derivatives really are so I suppose I have a lot of company but lets seek understanding, sister.

I just think the size of that market, forty-six trillion dollars, should have been a red flag to someone. It's similar to looking at the shacks that are valued at a hundred grand or more. It defies logic, rationality and common sense. Yet human greed and optimism seems to have fed what
one Federal Reserve taskmaster referred to as irrational exuberance. Like Marx, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker has a way with words.
"Irrational exuberance", indeed!

Curiously these psychological explanations, while being satisfying on, perhaps an emotional level, may be leaving something out, economics for example. Of course there is regulation and deregulation. Perhaps more regulation, less deregulation would have prevented this denouement.
But comrade workers and working class allies, we know it is something else. We know it is the capitalist system itself that was struggling to survive, forcing those running the system to play the fool and fraudster just to keep the huge contraption of profits going, and going and ooops!