John Truman Wolfe 
The 99 Strongest Banks In America and Why It Matters [EPUB ebook] 

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.