This might be of interest...

Warren Buffet Says Tax the Rich

http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2010/10/05/f_mpw_buffett_taxes.fortune/?hpt=T2

No... it's to actually stop it from happening by stopping the underlying principles.

Think of derivitives like HIV.

It can't kill you alone, but if you catch a cold.... watch out.

Derivitivies are world wide... yet the countries that avoided the derivitives crash were largely financially healthy, fiscally conservative countries.

The housing bubble is what triggered the derivitives collapse.

The reason is because a lot of derivitives were morgages involving many different houses in different states... or in europe countries.  (They actually had a near simaltanious housing bubble.)

This was completly unexpected because, generally that's now how realestate works.  Real estate goes up here or down there... it's never always up and always down.   Except it ended up being always up and always down due to the previously mentioned overextended lending.

A giant devaluation of this caused those derivitives to fail, which led to people not having enough money to cover other derivitives. (Hence why they failed and the number of derivitives that failed wasn't only subprime morgages.)

There is literally no way to prevent this from happening, except by stopping things like housing bubbles.  The derivitives are out there already.  They are worth more then 20 times the amount of money that actually exists.  There is no regulations that can allow such a thing to be covered.  There isn't enough money in existance to prevent deritivitives from crashing the market if something happens.

Stopping derivitives right now will hurt economic growth and cause a double dip in the recession.

In reality we probably shouldn't regulate derivitives and instead take a defensive stance against bubbles, untiil we get far enough out that we can suffer another huge recession.  Either that or do it veeeeery slowly.

Again, I agree that the housing bubble triggered the collapse, but it was NOT the underlying cause of it.  The market itself is unsustainable.  Having a market worth over $600 trillion when all of the world financial assets are worth less than $200 trillion is just not sustainable and is extemely fragile.  This was going to collapse with or without the housing bubble.

See that's the thing... it's not really extremely fragile... if it was, it would of happened a lot sooner.

Derivitives are like a Nuclear Reactor.  They're usually very safe... but if a perfect storm of things happens... the surrounding area is seriously screwed.

The derivitives market only crashed because a nationwide housing bubble crash was completely unheard of before.  It's like losing your house and not having flood insurance, even though there has never been a flood in your area.

There wasn't any contigency protecting from it because it was thought to be something that couldn't happen.

It can't have collapsed without the housing bubble.  There needs to be an external reason for derivitives to collapse.  The only way for the derivitives market to crash is for a LOT of deritivitives to need to be paid on.  Which only happens due to a crash in a "real" credit market.

It's a hell of a risk to run, like guessing a number between 1 and 100, and if you guess right you get shot in the head... but if you guess wrong you get a bunch of money.

Something that should be stopped?  Yeah probably, not something that can be taken all out at once though, unless you just want to be shot in the head since a heavy clamp down on derivitives would have the same effect as crashing derivitives, heck it'd probably cause the existing derivitives to crash.

It did happen sooner, in 1998 to the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund.

I guess that is where we disagree in that I believe this market is extremely fragile and getting moreso every day.  If left unregulated for much longer, we'll see a market worth 10, 20, 30 times the value of its actual assets.  At some point there will be a crisis that affects those assets and the whole thing will come tumbling down.

I hope you are right and I'm wrong,

Capitalism is reworked Feudal system since the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century. 

Capitalism  neo-feudalism in a nut shell. The hierarchial order system is still their to maintain status quo of socio-economic . Kings & Queens, Aristocrats, nobles,guards, serfs, slaves and peasants get new titles. 

Socialism(Israeli Kibbutz system), Marxism(Mao's China and Stalin's Russia and Eastern Bloc) , National Socialism(Hitler's Nazi Germany), Social Capitalism, Communism(Kampuchea: Pol Pot), Anarchism(nation with no government) and other social engineering experiments have trialled and failed with devastating consequences and huge loss of life. 

In Capitalism every individual is a steward of the economy, and the amount of wealth they have accumulated represents the portion of the economy that they're in charge of. The great thing about Capitalism is that most people accumulate more wealth through actions which grow the economy, and as a result the people who are the wealthiest are the people who're best suited to grow the economy. Certainly, there are individuals who can "game the system" to build their own fortune without actually contributing anything of value, and it is reasonable to try to prevent these tactics from working through regulation and oversight, but they're generally in the minority.

Now, the consequence of this is that individuals who mismanage their portion of the economy generally see a reduction in wealth; and repeated mismanagement will result in poverty even for people with very large sums of money. Consider the number of lottery winners, or celebrities who declare bankruptcy after having tens of millions of dollars; often being enough that they could live in luxury for the rest of their life without ever working, and then their children children could inherit enough money to live in luxury, and so on.

With that said, most efforts to redistribute wealth do not increase the standard of living (and often decrease the standard of living in the long run) of people who it is supposed to benefit, while it tends to act as a drain on everyone else.

The world's richest individuals  hide their wealth and have accumulated through out history more than half the world's wealth. Rich elites are masters at evading tax and are above the law.. 

1% of the world rules over the other 99%. The top 1% (Monopolistic large company owners) hold  more than 50% of the world's wealth and the remaining 99% have to live off bread crumbs. Typical Feudal system of ancient history still exists in the  modern world. 2 billion people in developing nations live off $1 per day. 

Multinational companies are relocating to cheaper labour markets. Huge job losses in the US and Europe and the jobs are not coming back. Recessions result in huge job losses and the economy never recovers to its position before the recession. Male unemployment rates tends to increase after a recession period and never fully recovers. 

Globalist scum are buying up national public assets around the world and increasing their Monopolistic power and control. Public assets are being sold to rich private elites for discount rates. Privatisation of government assets is theft. Privatisation of utilities has resulted in sky rocketing prices. CFR, Bilderbergers, Club of Rome and the UN. 

Financial meltdown in Europe and America was a deliberate plan by the elites.  Privately owned International bankers stopped the flow of credit/money and the financial market collapsed. Housing and share market have both de-valuated in the US and Europe.

First off, do you believe the propaganda you spout?

There are many problems with the large corporate structure that much of the economy is based on today (they tend to be too short sighted for example) but they're certainly the most egalitarian structuring of production we have come up with so far. The owners of large corporations are every investor, through pensions, mutual funds and stocks; and anyone can benefit along with these companies by making "sacrifices" today to invest in these companies to benefit tomorrow.

On top of this, in many ways corporations are much better stewards than governments are. The BP oil spill was a disaster and BP deserves to be shamed for such a disgrace, but consider the Sudan and Nigeria where governments run oil companies and they're doing much more damage to the environment than BP did; and there is no effort to prevent further damage or clean up the damage that has already been done. During communist reign in the USSR and in China today there is far less concern about environmental issues than there was in western capitalist countries even though the "government" managed the means of production.

Beyond that, there is no master group of elites that are planning economic downturns ...

The reality is that the (Ivy League) elites are far less educated and intelligent than most people would believe, and they have a far worse understanding of how the real world operates than any of us would assume. While it is not true of all of them, many of these individuals judge people based entirely on the "Status" they display rather than on meaningful characteristics; and therefore an individual who came from the correct university is more worthy of being hired than someone who has the correct understanding of the economy.

When you have large hedge funds (or investment portfolios) being managed by inexperienced 24 year olds because they came from the right family, went to the right university, and know the right people (read: Chelsea Clinton) you're going to have a financial system which is unstable because these naive morons can easily be manipulated.

Basically, stop looking for conspiracy theories for things that can easily be explained by stupidity.

umh? why even question this. Utopia is Utopia, for the rest of us is reality, if you spread the wealth, there'll always be someone to take advantage of it.

At least with work for what you want, you actually have a relative equality for people. (oh and yes, you can self educate yourself if you really want to succeed and have no material means for it).