A second reason that they might well fear more is exposure of the full extent of the domestic spying programs and their involvement in blessing it. Rockefeller especially smells bad on that. There still has not been a full description of what exactly Comey and Ashcroft refused to sign off on, except that it was somehow worse than the program that continued and has had some exposure, that it had been running for some time before the infamous hospital incident, and that it was egregious enough that a large set of DoJ career staff and even political appointees were ready to resign en masse to stop it. We also know that Rockefeller can't keep his story straight on what he knew when and how he responded to what he was told.

Torture is arguably more evil than domestic spying, but its practice seems to have been kept more internal to the executive branch and Congress (including Feinstein) has taken advantage of the opportunity to act shocked and wag their fingers at the Bush Mob for it. The domestic spying programs seem to have been run past congressional leaders for the purpose of co-opting them and getting additional political cover (and cover-up cooperation) contemporaneously with the crimes. The Senatorial freakout at the prospect of Panetta at CIA and the clumsy suggestion that an insider is needed instead hints at there being dirty laundry at CIA that has not really been aired yet, and I'd bet on it being related to domestic spying (where it is clear that Rockefeller, at least, was a collaborator) . The torture story is already out there and Senators have done their CYA: the line is that they didn't really know about it until afterwards and they were appalled by it. On domestic spying the whole story is still obscure and it looks like our legislators were active participants.

You started talking about money but now you're talking about wealth, and they are not interchangeable. Money gets created in the financial markets ultimately by central banks both buying debt directly (as the Fed does with Treasury debt) and by making loans to banks that are collateralized by debt held by the banks.

I know the Masters of the Universe are smart enough to outwit themselves, but I am not that clever. So would somebody explain to me, in small words, how in hell you organize a poker game in which everybody loses?

LEVERAGE!

In normal finance, people routinely look at the market value of their investments as if it were real. If you buy 200 shares of a company's stock when the market price is $10, you pay $2000. If you hold it for 20 years, you might well find those shares now worth $5000 at $25 a share. Sell 80 shares back to the person you bought them from, and you both have the same cash you started with. You also have 120 shares worth (in principle) $3000 while he has 80 shares worth $2000. Now suppose those are GM shares: they drop in value to $1 in a year because everyone believes the company is no longer worth anything. Both parties are exactly where they started on a cash basis, but on paper there has been either a $1800 loss (over the whole period) or maybe a $4800 loss (in the last year) and both parties surely see themselves as having lost.

This is made more real by the application of leverage. Imagine that when you had $3000 worth (120 shares) of GM stock and thought you knew auto investing, your broker happily lends you $1000 to buy 100 Ford shares "on margin" with both stocks being collateral. You now have a brokerage account with $4000 in assets and a $1000 margin loan: net value $3000. As both stocks drop in value and hit $5 per share, (for calculation simplicity...) the broker calls you and demands coverage of the margin. You send him $500 and have him sell stock to make up the other $500 by selling 60 shares of GM and 40 shares of Ford. Now you have 60 shares of each one left. Meanwhile, everyone holding those companies in margin accounts is getting margin calls, forcing sales push the prices down on both stocks to $1. So now, instead of having lost $2880 on paper with zero net cash change, you have now also thrown $500 in real money down that drain. That's $380 lost no matter how you look at it, and $3380 from the point of view that you had stocks and cash worth $3500 net that is now worth $120. The broker has not made or lost money (except for the low rate on margin loans) but whoever bought the shares at $5 (helping make the broker whole) now can't get more than $100 for the shares he paid $500 for. Everyone trading the stocks in that scenario loses, and the losses get magnified hugely by the use of borrowed money (aka "leverage") as capital.

For investment houses in the recent past, it has been common to work at huge leverage ratios. In the above example, the leverage ratio was 1:3, i.e. $1000 borrowed to supplement $3000 in net value in the account. The number that gets tossed around a lot these days for investment firms at the peak of their idiocy is 30:1 for Lehman Bros. When the leverage ratio of an operation goes above 1:1, it becomes possible in principle for it to lose more money on paper than it has in actual capital. If Madoff was working in 30:1 territory, he had very little room for error and could easily have wiped out his clients' money many times over by just having a bit of bad luck.