Wow. Take 5 minutes to scroll through this infographic today. The TL;DR here is “there’s way more derivatives than actual money in the world today”.
The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts. In my view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.
—Warren Buffett
Source: All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization