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I think we could both agree that the article was written in an inflammatory way that involved significant omissions of fact.

The phenomenon of bidding up investments beyond all sanity is centuries old. I believe the first recorded incident was Holland's TulipMania, where people were trading their houses for individual bulbs, because they felt the bulbs would continue to appreciate forever.

I understand that this is personal because it's probably your money, among other people's. And I can't blame you for taking losses personally, but that doesn't mean the executives involved necessarily did anything wrong.

There seems to be an interesting slant in the news that blames everything in the known universe on fraud. For example, the disasterous collapse of WorldCom seems to be credited to fraud. In reality, WorldCom overpaid for a lot of assets. They borrowed money on those assets at the time. Now that the Internet boom is gone, and people aren't signing up for broadband Internet access in massive numbers, the assets are worth pennies on the dollar. That's a crash due to overoptimism, not fraud.

They did cook the books for a while to try and make things look OK for as long as possible, but all that did was to delay the collapse by a few months and make it more spectacular. Actual blame for the collapse should properly go to bad investment decisions, not fraud.

This is very similar in nature to what's going on with the California power crisis. Governor Davis is saying that the state overpaid due to tricks and fraudulent transactions. There were some tricks, and some fraudulent transactions, and the people involved are (quite rightly) being punished. But those tricks amounted to one or two percent of the total price increases at most. Eliminating them would have not helped the broader picture at all.

In short, we should be careful about scapegoating perfectly good companies and reasonable people. Save your wrath for genuine incompetence and deliberatly poor behaviour.

Remember, sending the burden to corporations lightens that of Gray Davis - and as you know, he's one person who richly deserves blame for the recent disasters.

Agreed on the inflammatory content.. it is the Merc after all.

I hear what you are saying and admit I was a bit overly sensitive when I initially posted it. There are a lot of positives in how things work currently and there are a lot of good companies out there that may get it for no reason.

This wealth creation enterprise business thing is a wonder to behold. This is a price we pay for having the world's premiere economic dynamo.

Questions of fairness and circumstance and such should not prevent the market from functioning without fetters as much as possible.

This article is the first in a 3 parter that the Merc will be running.

There seems to be an interesting slant in the news that blames everything in the known universe on fraud. ...a crash due to overoptimism, not fraud.

...blame for the collapse should properly go to bad investment decisions, not fraud.

In short, we should be careful about scapegoating perfectly good companies and reasonable people. Save your wrath for genuine incompetence and deliberatly poor behaviour.

Very well said. There were crooks out their at Enron, Aurthor Anderson, Cal ISO, Cal PX, etc. Lets hope that the real crooks all spend plenty of jail time and that the government cracks down on white collar crime.

But there was also lots of painic (stupid!) buying, like the high priced California DWR power contracts that Davis said were great, then said they were evil, then renegotated and claimed he saved the state lots of money, then said were evil, then is trying to force new contract terms on the generation companies.

I remember A. Greenspan being critisized roundly for saying that investors were making mistakes bidding up the price of stocks too high. People should have listened much more carefully. He was right. You would expect him to be right. It was something people didn't want to hear so they ignored it and now blame the "insiders."