The US Treasury has just completed its plan for the bailout. The "Rescue Bill," as it's favorably called, will involve the now infamous sum of $700 billion, with $250 billion going immediately to the financial institutions and the rest to be spent in installments as needed.

Now seems like a good time to consider the $700 billion figure.

Over the weekend, I received a forwarded email about the bailout that I immediately took to be a fabrication -- a fake quote from a deliberately vague source so it could never be disproved.

But inspired by curiosity, I looked for it online, and to my surprise, found it within a minute on one of the country's most reputable sites for financial and business news: Forbes.com.

The quote, from a "spokeswoman for the US Treasury", states that the $700 billion dollars is "not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number."

I couldn't believe it was real. It's absurd and unconscionable that the US Treasury would simply conjure a number out of thin air and say, "Here! This oughta do the trick."

But then again, maybe it isn't. The spokeswoman's quote may not have been fake, but our monetary system certainly is. We haven't had a gold standard in 75 years. Every time we spend a dollar, its value is determined entirely by someone else's willingness to accept it. It's all just Monopoly money, and our entire credit system is a gigantic house of cards.

So when we're talking about much larger numbers, where the sellers and buyers are banks and governments, the dollar agreement described above is merely expanded. Every time a bank agrees to buy up the "assets" of another bank, or a government bails out a defunct and overspent industry, the transaction is only possible if both parties agree to accept the number as meaningful in some way.

The cycle then repeats itself, and the money -- like oil, water and air -- begins to circulate. First it's in the hands of one bank or other organization, then another, and then another. It's always just moving around, but "it" is actually nothing.

Or nothing more than an agreement, anyway.

So yes, the Treasury could have come up with any formidable number. It could have said $500 billion, $1.2 trillion, $875 billion. It doesn't really matter.

None of this makes the number OK, of course, and neither does the fact that $700 billion has become the de facto figure that people around the world are talking about when they talk about the financial crisis. It's become a reality of our economic and political climate, and regardless of how arbitrary it is, there's no longer any other option.

After the Senate decides what to finally do with the plan that was finalized very early this morning, we'll be hearing a lot more about this random, abstract, meaningless number.

It's amazing how much power something so artificial and nonexistent can wield.