sorry, don't have time to try to make it less boring at the moment.

my advise for you: create another alt and spice things up yourself

Will someone please talk about the impact of the 1999 repeal of various regulations in the Glass-Steagal act and its impact on the financial sector implosion in the United States?

Should we be placing restrictions on short sellers now.. the same people that could have warned us about endemic problems since the beginning but were only chastised by federal regulators?

Can we blame all of this on Greenspan and his 1% fed funds rate to stave off one of the weakest recessions in our history? Or is it the various encouragments and incentives by our government to grant the gift of home ownership to people without the werewithal to afford it?

Is there something wrong with the basic structure of our corporations that allows short-sighted interests to prevail over long-term common sense?

These are the things that need discussing around here.

All are probably relevant except chastising the short sellers, if I am interpreting that paragraph correctly. If short sellers are warning us about something, why should they be chastised?

Good question, skrum. Short sellers profit from bad news. Often that's bad news that they themselves dig up in order to profit from it. They provide the beneficial function of helping to alert everyone else to problems that may exist.

Nevertheless, they are treated very unfavorably by federal regulators and also by the public in general since the common man wants everything to be rosy and go up, up, up. Very few American investors profit when the market goes down.

Some think that regulators also hate to see private interests outside of themselves find issues that THEY are responsible for finding such as accounting magic a la Enron or (name a bank).

It's plainly obvious that hedge funds and short sellers get extra regulator scrutiny for their efforts. The question is whether this is appropriate, and whether it helped to foster our current situation.

If "dig up" not equal to "cause" the regulators/prosecutors should hang back. If the short seller is the cause of the underlying event for collapse of the stock, insider trading should punish the short seller from profiting from causing harm to his own company. If there is no underlying event, the short seller will not profit unless he can cause a decline in the price of the stock, for which he should be held accountable.

This is actually very interesting. Thanks for the incentive wish. :D

I heard that some hedge fund "mogul" made huuuuge profits over the last year and shot up into the Forbe's list of America's 400 richest people, of which the lower cutoff in something like $1.23 billion. I also heard that the founder of AIG lost $800 million.

This is some crazy shit man. I haven't seen the DOW this low since December of '01. :/

I'm glad I invested all my money this summer into stocks. I'm losing more money each day than I made that day in wages...

My life sucks.

But at least we have a thumping exciting forum thread to read.

Just don't bail out now Batman. My mother called for investment advice this week. When that happens we are at the bottom.

It's like the reverse of the taxi-driver signal (aka when cabbies gave stock tips in the late 90s it was time to bail).

Sorry, now that I'm in school again, I have less time to donate even a little of my godly forum prescence.... :)