According to Fortune Magazine, if JPMorgan can “distribute 10 million stoves… you could be looking at a business with modest costs and between $200 million and $450 million a year in revenues.”

There must be something in the water on Wall Street that makes these firms dream up such ridiculous ideas. Creating a market built on a house of cards that man’s activity is causing global warming is dangerous enough, but that risk gets magnified when markets are created by assigning an artificial value to a ubiquitous and invisible gas such as carbon dioxide.

Our economy is already reeling from the banks’ involvement in debacles such as mortgage securitization. Now Wall Street wants to gamble on carbon dioxide credit IOUs.

If the financial industry could not manage the risks associated with mortgages - which are based on tangible assets - how can it possibly manage the risks associated with trading emission credits?

For instance, how is JPMorgan going to verify the use of millions of stoves in Africa?

At a time when some investors are turning to gold and other precious metals because they fear a loss in value of paper money, the president and Wall Street are advocating for a policy that assigns a price to air.

Unfortunately, with the “too big to fail” belief dominating the country, we simply can’t laugh at Wall Street CEOs and such a misuse of our capital markets.

Sadly, due to the bailout, the laugh is on us because taxpayer money is propping up Wall Street and its latest lobbying effort.