So Far, So Bad for the Paulson Bailout

I was expecting Wall Street to start the week with a spring in its step because of the Paulson Bailout. I bet Paulson was too.
No such luck. The kerfuffle about protecting peoples' deposit accounts in European banks overshadowed it. Maybe the money markets spotted that if Europe guaranteed its peoples deposits, there would be no money available for a bailout of the money markets.

I learned today that the total value of outstanding derivatives has reached 1.14 quadrillion dollars; that's $1,140,000,000,000,000*. The Paulson bailout figure of $700 billion pales into an insignificant 0.005% of the total.

Let the money markets go hang, and use the credibility of the central banks to support a new economy, based on real values instead of greed.

See Buy? Bah! for an update on this figure.