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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (40477)	9/16/2001 6:12:50 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

Laden and his associates are short the insurance stocks. Before the attack it is reported that Bin Laden’s associates may have “sold short” stock in a Munich company that holds secondary insurance on the World Trade Center. If you "short-sell" shares, you can make huge profits when a stock plummets because of unanticipated bad news — unanticipated, that is, by all except those involved in a conspiracy to cause that bad news. In a short sale, an investor would borrow a certain number of shares from a broker, immediately sell them, and then once the stock price had fallen, buy shares to return to the broker. Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra reported Saturday that the FBI is looking into possible short-selling of the stocks of reinsurance companies in the four trading days before the terrorist attacks on the United States on Tuesday. Reinsurance firms assume risk by providing backup insurance for insurance companies. The stocks of the three reinsurance companies — AXA in France, Munich Re in Germany and Swiss Re in Switzerland — dropped 13 percent to 15 percent in the week before the attack.