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To: Secret_Agent_Man who wrote (342572)	9/3/2007 6:59:46 PM
From: stan_hughes	Respond to of 436258

Nope, you don't have to be a bank for this to happen -- anybody who's ever gotten a margin call in the market at an inopportune time has seen this movie before, but I've never considered myself a working part of 'the shadow banking system' -- maybe we should be flattered. I also don't think you have to be a bank to practise the appropriate matching of maturities between your assets and liabilities either -- IMO it's common sense -- in fact, it's only greed and hubris that makes somebody take the risk of doing otherwise and yield to the temptation of trying to reap or clip what appears to be some extra vig (spread) that looks like it's just lying there for the taking. But it's the longer maturity risk on the one hand versus the security of a nearer term payback on the other that puts the spread there in the first place, and you mismatch your holdings in trying to scoop this 'free' money at your peril. Note also that the old boys discussion as cited is focused on trying to pigeon-hole the dynamics of the crisis into some historic category, rather than speaking to perhaps 'why' investors are suddenly trying to get their money back here, i.e. before the riskloves lose any more of it on these greed schemes -- of course, if the old boys started discussing the 'why' part, they would have to first and foremost castigate themselves for loaning funds out to the riskloves to gamble with using fake AAA credentials in the first place. I also don't see any mention of the fact there that a lot of the funds of which they speak have already gone to money heaven both by fraud and also courtesy of the collapsing residential RE market, and therefore won't be coming back onto any bank's balance sheet except in the form of a liability to those parties who hold guarantees of repayment of their investments from the bank conduit's parent -- talk about a case of your kids going off and smashing up the local 5-star hotel and Dad getting stuck with the repair bill