Deleveraging

So the Congress starts shoveling money at Wall Street. As expected, the filthy rich begin to steal it — the Guardian reports that $70 billion will disappear in compensation at just a few firms (though this story seems speculative, lacking specifics, and incompletely sourced) — but I worry more about the part I don't understand. The derivatives. Everybody agrees that there are about $50 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") in mortgage derivatives out there, perhaps a couple hundred trillion in other exotic derivatives. Does it make sense to pretend that none of that has any influence over normal financial assets? Is it possible that most of the money dumped at one end of Wall Street might be skimmed off at the other, through derivatives? I don't know, I'm just asking, since I don't see much if any serious talk about it. If an unwinding of derivatives positions requires a forced sale of other assets, as seems to be happening, it would make sense, as I've suggested a couple times already, for the government to freeze derivatives transactions until such time as there's adequate transparency and regulation in their market. Otherwise the bottom of this crash might well still be a long way off.