After a catastrophic week of trading markets closed on Friday with such huge losses that Wall Street was actually down for the entire year. A weeklong downturn on the Dow Jones, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 was enough to erase four months of gains and leave investors around the world groping for answers.

Over the weekend, leaders in the European Union seemed to find an answer. This market decline was in fact their problem, having stemmed from a Greek debt crisis that was allowed to grow out of control. After allowing the crisis to fester during several months of indecision the “Greek contagion,” which could have been dealt with in February, had driven the euro down in international currency markets and left investors worried about a return to the collapse cycle of 2007 and 2008.

According to CNNMoney.com, the E.U. has set up a nearly $1 trillion program – largely funded by Germany and France – aimed at stabilizing the slide of its currency and buffeting the domino-like cascade that could set upon its smaller members.

The main provision of this program is nearly $570 billion to show up government-backed loans and renew confidence in credit markets. It had been projected, months ago, that the cost of bailing out Greece would have been in the range of around $40 billion. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that her nation’s stasis on the Greek problem was driven by fiscal responsibility. Her reward for this responsibility is a bailout perhaps twenty times the size of original estimates.

Secondary provisions of the trillion dollar fund will also be used to build in a stabilization fund meant as a cache of last resort for future missteps.

The immediate result of the E.U. rescue announcement was a massive surge on global stock markets. European indexes pushed up by 6 or even 8 percent, markets in Asia were up nearly 2 percent across the board, and markets in the U.S. hovered at around 4 percent gains.

The fact that Europe was able to come up with a solution so quickly after the onset of collapse, which only lasted one week, is likely a result of lessons learned from the U.S. two years ago.

Unfortunately, the fact that a solution had to be discovered in the first place is shocking. We saw in 2007 and 2008 that being overly dedicated to financial instruments could be destructive. Finance is not productive, it creates nothing, it leaves nothing behind. We put real money in, in the form of capital investment, and we get nothing tangible in return. The result is a situation where society can lose vast sums of its wealth to little hiccups in the natural market.

Instead of finding new ways to save ourselves every time finance takes a hit, we need to find ways to build our wealthy other than finance. Europe has the ability to save itself because a crisis in Greece can be contained by joint efforts from other member states, including the U.S. and IMF. The United States on the other hand, which is more susceptible to these market bubbles than Europe, does not have any larger force capable of rescuing it.

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