I love how we Americans are now so "numb" to our county's plight, and refer to STAGGERING amounts of money with more zeros behind it than God ever intended money to have in the first place as "not that much, compared to"....
OK, well here is more perspective for you, the total dollar value of derivatives trading world wide is 1000 trillion dollars, and that is about 18 times the value of all the goods and services produced in the world in a year. Now, not a penny is set aside to back these securities, no one discloses who is holding them, most of them are credit default swaps that are like insurance. When the investment bank Lehman Brothers fell, AIG was holding billions of dollars worth of CDS and was required to pay out when they had nothing set aside for it, so the gov had to bail them out. Wall street makes money on these useless securites. Warren Buffet called them "Instruments of financial mass destruction". They are a doomsday machine as the fall of one entity will domino all others leaving us all at financial ground zero. So far, nothing has been done to regulate these devices, and the well paid weasels buy and sell them knowing they aren't worth the paper they are printed on, but each party declares them as assets and they then go to their bosses and ask for a huge bonus based on how much money they made their companies.
If any of you 'free market' types want to see the reality of your idealized paradise look no further than the unregulated derivatives trade, and consider that it is a nearly perfect system for the 8th layer of Hades.