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

To: BGR who wrote (71698)	12/10/1999 10:34:00 AM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

BGR, >>I am not sure what you consider as the "public". Do I count, for example? Anyway, if it is so well documented, how come there is no class-action lawsuit?<< In my mind the public is investors that are not banks, brokers, and/or dealers. They may be individuals, hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds etc... The put/call ratios just prior to meltdown showed an enormous accumulation of puts just prior to the break. I can't know exactly who was buying and who was selling of course. I remember the charts well enough though. They were in the NY Times. In the months following the meltdown and ramp job there were reports from a variety of mainstream publications about how many Wall St. firms were sitting on large losses at the time. There were also reports from top level bankers who had exposure to Wall St. that implied that they were too as a result of that exposure. This stuff sort of slowly became public. Of course there were lots of rumors also. I cannot know who was losing on what positions. Certainly no one can prove it was a ramp job in a court of law. But given the situation and the certainty that AG.com was informed, are there really any doubts about what happened and why. Somebody had to win and somebody had to lose. AG.com decided that his friends shouldn't lose. If you believe that's part of his job (and it may be) it goes back to my basic complaints about the system. On the issue of derivatives and credit etc... I agree that the Fed is responsible for some of it and not responsible for other parts of it. It is responsible for a significant portion of the credit expansion and the speculative environment related to that. It is also responsible for fostering the "bail out mentality" among those that assume they will be bailed out and therefore take unwarranted risks of all types. That covers a lot of blame, including LTCM to a large degree. Wayne