Do you believe there is any money actually left or is it all just paper being moved around?

First let's define "Money. Short version, money is a means of fair exchange." It uses units of value to "barter" for goods and services. In modern times whether money is identified either as currency units of exchange or digital transactions on the Internet, it all works and is held together by confidence that both the payee and the receiver of these units of exchange agree that their transaction is of more or less equal value. If a good or service is in short supply, the price point of that good or service has the advantage of making a profit for the seller where they make more than its face value for having sold it. That's how McDonald's makes money on a soft drink costing pennies for 79 cents and how Lawyers make money based on the cheap prep work done by paralegals before they settle lawsuits for their clients. In its purest sense, money is a confidence game.

When it becomes a Con Game, as in a nefarious rip off in the minds of those being handed money not worth its face value, things get very dicey indeed.

In the United States, our country stands behind its debts by collection and dispersion of taxes paid by those who do commerce in the world. Taxes in the form of excise fees on strategic goods such as rubber tires and barrels of oil and so forth form about 40% of value added taxes. The rest come from income taxes collected from every economic echelon in public life.

Currently, our government spends all the taxes collected from the prior fiscal year by the halfway mark each fiscal year. So, how it pays out funds NOW such as payrolls to government workers and toys from China is to print unfunded money. How it underwrites this unfunded money is to sell it to banks, foreign investors and foreign governments we owe for goods and services we have bought by floating Treasury Debt Bonds. The rate of interest the government also pays on this debt is relatively low because U.S. Dollars are rated AAA by world economic consortium's. In a sense, your comment that it is just paper being moved around has merit. Worse is that if we continue to print more paper it dilutes the value of the "good" money in circulation at every faster rates and that is called inflation. It makes the sum of all money in circulation have less purchase power. Overseas, where they ignore our Cost of Living Index as complete bunk, the purchase power of dollars is dropping at two or three times the rate of point of sale cash register inflation percentage totals in the United States. I.E. a 3% increase here is 9% in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

That inflation drives up the price of goods bought within our own markets, such as medicines and food and gas and power and other goods. That also drives up the cost of goods bought overseas such as litres of gas or barrels of oil whether one is a tourist in Europe or Asia who exchanged their U.S. Dollars for foreign money or a futures broker buying oil by electronic transfer at a shocking rate of change.

If the banks and international monetary exchange consortium's downgrade the credit standing of the United States from AAA to AA or worse, because they begin loosing confidence in our ability to eventually pay them back for our debt bonds or properties owned outright in our country they will do like any financial institution would do - they will spread their risk by raising interest rates such that in the United States where we are fast closing on the point that we don't create enough wealth to be able to just make interest ONLY payments on our debt while going deeper into debt due to the raised interest rates.

Anyone who suffered the credit card crunch where they were confronted with high card interest rates JUST because they "Owed too Much," will relate to the disaster it can be after that due to the domino, me too, stampede for upping ones interest to the point that bankruptcy is the only option and ones creditors are left with nothing and start going out of business, as well such as Fannie Mae, for example.

That slippery slope if unchecked will lead to World Depression, not just soup lines in America. That road leads to unfunded military protection from our real, not imagined enemies and very real threats of world war in our lifetime as our creditors invade to take what we own on paper to pay for what we owe them in hard assets.

At the present time we are loosing the money Con Game - we have to get on a more responsible program of paying down our debt and we can only do that, NOW, by spending less so we have surpluses to spend on our debt. There are no other options for winning this con game, anymore.

BTW. The phrase is smoke and mirrors, not smoking mirrors. It is a reference to some of the tricks used in magic shows to fool people using smoke and mirrors. As to your question, 90% of monetary transactions in the industrialized world are actually just numbers on a computer screen. If you think about the 770 billion dollar bailout of wall street by the US Government, that is more money than is actually in all of the banks in our country. Add to that the fact that since 1972, when the US went away from the gold standard, our money has no more value than the faith we have in our government. Prior to 1972, our money was backed by gold, meaning that for every dollar that was printed, we had to have 1 dollars worth of gold on hand in our reserves. After 1972, the government could print as much money as it felt like. So if they run low, they print more. That works just fine until you owe more money than you can back up with goods and services. Get ready for a wild ride. In germany, after world war 2, it took an entire wheelbarrow worth of money to purchase a loaf of bread because the currency was so devalued. That is America sometime in the next few years.

Yeah, it is a very serious issue. By bailing out more and more money, you can't achieve nothing but raging inflation of national currency. Jobs are the right solution, but jobs without profit ? It is not that stupid as it might sound, I mean jobs without profit. Come to think of it, many jobs are just about speculations and creating profits out of nothing. I mean all these cover ups surely add to something substantial being very wrong with bussines transparency !