Bet you haven't seen this on a bumper sticker lately: "Save the derivatives market."

Hardly catchy. Especially since almost no one actually knows what a derivative is. And it sure goes against the emotions of the crowd right now.

Along with Christopher Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and of a Wall Street culture of greed, derivatives are the villains in the current collapse of the global financial system.

The global market for derivatives has a notional value of $455 trillion. The market for a single kind of derivative called credit default swaps (CDS) comes to $62 trillion. A single company, the recently rescued AIG, was counterparty to $422 billion in derivatives. That's just a tad below the low-end estimate for the government buy-up plan as a whole. For a single company.

Another devil in the financial crisis