AIG is one of the main players that created the massive derivative market for mortgage notes and debt. The people who manage it are a specialized group. Derivatives are not a major one gets a degree in from Yale or Harvard. You enter the career like an apprentice and over time learn the ins and outs. Unfortunately for us, the ones who created the financial time bomb are the only ones who can slowly defuse it without it blowing up in our faces and bringing down the world financial system. Like I stated in my post, the derivative market is 55 trillion to 1.5 quadrillion in liabilities. All the GDP in the world combined cannot cover the system when it collapses. This is the big shoe that hangs over our economic stability. Google the 2005 Congressional hearings on the derivative market. Congress knew about the potential problems posed by derivatives but no one wanted to regulate it or deal with it, or assumed the doomsday scenarios improbable. The collapse of Sept 2008 says otherwise.
Then it's just an illusion. If you and I bet a trillion bucks on a game, the worlds economic system isn't destroyed when the loser can't pay. If, as you say, the derivative markets will tag some with liabilities bigger than all things everywhere, than the whole thing is a joke and not really worth worrying about. There will be the same amount of real assets after the collapse as before. There will just be a greater number exposed fools, whose little monopoly game caused a few liquidity crisis before they got other jobs.