“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." -James Carville Who knows? No one knew how big of a deal it was to AIG until it was a big deal. The real scary thing is that the balance sheets of the biggest banks are out of control, fueled largely by bonds, short term loans to other financial institutions, and derivatives (CDS and CDO). Deutsche Bank, for example, is the largest bank in the world by balance sheet. Its total deposits are something like $400 billion. Its total balance sheet is about $55 trillion. So, yeah, it's a big deal, and a house of cards, but who knows when the wind will blow it over.I wonder how big of a deal the CDS's on these bonds is. Big enough to repeat what happened to AIG?