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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (64080)	7/6/1999 4:11:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

I have done several searches with various search engines, and I can't find any link to a quotation from Greenspan that deals with margin rates set by the Federal Reserve. That does not mean that he has not pronounced on this. There has been all sorts of speculation about the Fed surreptitiously buying options on stock indexes, which they do not have any authority to do, and very little on the possibility of their raising margin rates, which is one of their major grants of financial power. As I understand it (from an article in the Wall Street Journal on June 23), some brokers are already evading margin requirements by allowing customers of borrow directly from other customers' cash balances to buy stock. In the absence of new legislation or regulations to control this, the Fed could use its established power, at least, and raise margins. No one but me seems to think that they might be considering doing this.