How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street
Published on Monday, February 20, 2012 by Common Dreams
How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street
by Ellen Brown
In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15th:
Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end "too big to fail" but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled "systemically important" that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.
That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS). Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt.
CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up. CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down. .........................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/20
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for many that have been hanging around here at DU for the last ten years we have seen the writing on the wall many times and have been kind of wondering when it will actually happen. There are the simple mathematics about how the numbers don't ad up and we mostly know we are living in an artificial financial state of being has not been quite understood yet. Really though, these things that have always been there and been pointed out. The king having nothing on is just waiting to be discovered
So this state of finance is not going overlooked here. What fuse lights it up we don't know. It just hasn't happened yet because the crooks that have managed it and created it over the years have been able to put that fuse out before it did go boom! (so far)
So really it's kind of inevitable and just a matter of time before it does. Just like any ponzi scheme that cant stand on it's behalf if really examined closely it will also fold up. This is just a told you so, so just don't say nobody told you, because you have been warned 
P.S. lots of informative comments after the article also
