$516 TRILLION DOLLARS Ticking Bomb

Your share of a national debt (over $9 trillion so far), according to the Associated Press is some $30,000.00; that's about $30K in debt for everyone living legally in this country. Being citizen bears the high honor of bearing the debt your government is taking upon your children's children's future. It would be stories all over the place; how Japan and China owe the U.S. or how the dollar's decline reduced the U.S. to a cheap touristic destination for European working class and so on. But, what you are not going to read very often is the story of the real financial bomb ticking underneath this country and this world's financial realities.

The Bank for International Settlements carries, in its virtual vaults, some really interesting data. The U.S. economy is an $11 trillion dollars economy. The U.S. stock market is valued at roughly $11 trillion dollars, give a take a few, due to the volatility and Jim Cramer. The U.S. bond market is valued at about $20 trillion dollars. The rest of the world's stock markets is an additional $13 trillion dollars and the world bond markets adds a modest sum of $13 trillion dollars.

Of course all that money does not exist at all. Imagine if everyone tries, at the same moment, to withdraw her or his money? Requesting a hard, green cash, now, this very moment! Ha, that would be the day. Do you really believe the banks have even the fraction of that money at their disposal? Long since gone are the days of the gold standard. The Federal Reserve Bank requires the banks to carry not more than 10% of their (that is: yours) deposits in cash. The rest is lent out or invested elsewhere, mostly in numerous derivatives of the endlessly creative financial markets.

Therein leis the really funny part. Those "derivatives" are too often too obscure monetary instruments (like the package your mortgage company has sold over to some other money changer who sold it again and again and again while you keep paying for your death pledge, commonly known as mortgage) that are being traded in between banks, governments, mutual funds, hedge funds and so on. The TOTAL "value" of those derivatives in the world financial markets is obscene $516 trillion dollars!

All those numbers do not mean too much, written like this. They are simply too surreal to comprehend. So let us put them in some perspective: the world's GDP, all that all the people in the world produce during one full year is roughly $65 trillion dollars. To make things even clearer, each living, breathing human being in the world from Anchorage to Punta Arenas produces the value of about $10,000.00 a year. The "value" of all those derivatives financial markets are trading is, on the other hand, $78,114.00 per capita. The whole world's population, every single of us would have to work for full seven years, without spending a dime, just to cover the "value" of all these derivatives.

This is the bomb that is ticking beneath all this noise. Another LTCM (Long Term Capital Management whose $1.4 trillion dollars in derivatives almost broke Wall Street), one of thousands unregulated hedge fund could easily start a chain reaction of selling that would evaporate all the money, savings, funds, stocks that keep us feel prosperous. And you still worry about the U.S. national debt and your tiny little share of $120,000.00 for the family of four? And remember, $5 trillion that the U.S. government owes in form of T-bonds are maturing within a year. So to pay them off, the government would have to issue about $6 trillion, give or take a dime. If there will be someone to purchase them. If not, we will always have Iran to bomb.