The Reader’s Digest version is that there is a black hole of paper debt exceeding the total appraised value of all material things ever created by mankind by several orders of magnitude floating out there in the form of binary digits waiting to implode under it’s own enormous mass, which will surely take the whole global economy with it when it does.
If they are in fact just digits on a hard-drive somewhere why will it take down the world economy? Let us say I was importing iron ore from Brazil and exporting, I dunno, new tires to Brazil. These are actual physical trades.
Nobody ever seems to explain. It always goes from:
Derivatives are just bets on bets and aren’t supporting by anything all the way to it will destroy the world. Eyes glaze over from these descriptions because they don’t seem to be linked.