Banking-in the U.S. and globally-has devolved into a colossal Vegas-like casino and bankers have become the ultimate "whale" gamblers. The global banking system today has an estimated $1.2 quadrillion dollars in a kind of monetary heroin called derivatives.* The figure is mind-numbing, but just to give you a sense of the size of this madness, here it is with the appropriate number of zeroes (15): $1,200,000,000,000,000. Or, it may be more entertaining if you think of it this way: If you had a job that paid you $1,000 per second, it would take more than 31 years for you to earn $1 trillion. A quadrillion is 1,000 trillion. It's a big number. And I repeat, there are now $1.2 quadrillion dollars in derivatives held by financial institutions in the U.S. and abroad.