Following a headline that began “Number of the Week,” the Wall Street Journal reported that $132 billion has been lost by investors (or made up by taxpayers) on the kind of synthetic mortgage bets that have gotten Goldman Sachs in such trouble in recent days. $132 billion.

Another report in the last couple of days deals with how much the EU and IMF will have to come up with in order to bail out Greece from its present calamitous economic state. This number is about $155 billion. $155 billion to save a country of 11.2 million people from bankruptcy.

Something I find so telling about these numbers is how they relate to another number reported not so long ago by the Journal — $140 billion. This was the total of bonuses paid by the 20-odd banks in 2009 to its employees who created and sold the synthetic mortgages that cost investors all that money, the same bank employees whose advice helped get Greece into the Eurozone allowing it to borrow in the reckless manner that got it into its present fiscally disastrous situation.

Let’s put all these numbers into perspective. A few thousand Wall Street bankers make billions more in bonuses than the mega-billions they lost tens of thousands of investors who trusted them. And these same few thousand Wall Street bankers made almost as much money in bonuses in a single year as the huge multi-nation bailout needed to not only pull a European country of 11.2 million people back from the brink, but save the Eurozone itself from disintegration

Surely this can’t be right. Surely, even in an era when Wall Street has so warped, perverted, and restated the rules of the market to accommodate its own selfish definition of capitalism, this sort of allocation of wealth and debt can’t be allowed to continue.

Surely not. Surely not.

For more financial commentary (some in verse): http://www.wallstreetpoet.com