Gettin' in on this whole economic crisis bit

Tonight I read that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or the FDIC, has taken over Washington Mutual and resold it to JPMorgan Chase. In a normal financial setting, this would have been huge news, as Washington Mutual is by far the largest main-stream bank to "go under" (as I understand it, the bank didn't actually fold, but just needed help selling itself... stay tuned to see if Washington Mutual, as it was earlier this afternoon, remains the same company... I think it's not any more.) Of course with the Congress, the White House, and candidates McCain and Obama figuring out how to throw $700 billion of US taxpayer money to plug a "collapsing dike" (as Bill O'Reilly put it tonight), the WaMu transition is largely unnoticed.

So why is it important to me? Well it turns out that I actually have a deposit account at Washington Mutual (or, as it might be, I am now a proud client of JPMorgan Chase). I'm not worried about that small CD, as it was a case of "interest rate chasing" with some funds I didn't want to put into the stock market (does anyone want to put money into the stock market now? With the threat of 20%+ losses looming? Granted the market could be at a minimum now and this might actually turn out to be a very good time to buy... but the uncertainty is still there!)

I started thinking, what is $700 billion dollars? I mean, what does it actually mean? It looks like a handful of guys (and gals... equal-opportunity bashing!) in southern Manhattan took a beautiful thing, Newtonian calculus, and screwed with it, selling worthless investments under the fancy headline of "derivaties." And now we, the 300 million-strong United States of America, have to bail them out of their "bad investments". To me the phrase "bad investments" is a euphemism: why not call it for what it is: unbridled greed? For it seems like this handful (maybe a few hundred people, plus secretaries & bureaucratic staff?) of people have lost the equivalent of:

5% of the US annual gross domestic product. That's like taking the city of Norman, OK, with its population of 100,000, and abolishing the economic activity of 5,000 of them for 2007.

1% of the *world* gross domestic product. That's the economic activity of 70,000,000 people!

Maybe some of my readers with better economic or business sense than I can offer some insight: how can 100 "traders" (gamblers?), in a few months' time, wipe out the equivalent of the annual production of 70 million people??! It's mind-boggling. I liked the analogy from McDonalds: a $700 billion bail-out is enough to buy each American 2,000 McD's apple pies. :-) As Jon Stewart joked, maybe the newly homeless could build a make-shift home out of those pies?