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To: derek cao who wrote (23532)	8/28/1998 1:55:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

OT - Public company who sell shares to PUBLIC need to let public know basic financial information. Actually, as Asia proves, they don't provide such transparency unless forced, whether they sell shares to the public or not. AT&T is GOVERNMENT sponsored monopoly. IMHO, it should a good "managed free market" example Actually they were a self-perpetuating monopoly in the late 70's. The problem any competitors had was getting access to the switching networks, since AT&T said 'mine, all mine!!! I can charge anything I want for such a connection.' But without a connection there was little viable business. I do not want to imply that they would not have eventually toppled under their own weight, but it might have taken another 20 or 40 years of overpriced service. My point was not that all government regulation is good, nor even that there is a single optimum balance between Marxism and Randism, but that the two extremes are definitely bad. Some government intervention is almost certainly good, although it may be debatable exactly what and how much. Clark

To: derek cao who wrote (23532)	8/28/1998 2:27:00 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

OT Seems to me you need to get your terms straight. In an unregulated market, as I've most often seen it defined, public companies are not required to disclose the kind of information they disclose in the US. Such a market is "free", but it isn't necessarily healthy, as Asia and Russia recently discovered. In a planned economy, there essentially is no market as we understand it at all. The government declares who gets investment and who doesn't. The US market actually lies somewhere in between. It's free, in the sense that capital can go pretty much anywhere it wants, but highly regulated, in that financial transparency, environmental regulations, antitrust law, etc. attempt to protect the public interest from individuals. Tax incentives encourage investment in public goods. It seems to me that the Asian, and now Russian, markets got in trouble partly because they allowed free transfer of capital without putting in place the disclosure requirements that protect investors in the US. Can you imagine any US company accumulating a 300% debt-to-equity ratio? Katherine