Reply-To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
It's an ironic indication of where we are that Bill Gates is being hounded by the Justice Department, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Novell, and Ralph Nader while no one is hounding John Meriwether. In fact, the Federal Reserve System, nominally nongovernmental (wink wink) just helped to bail out his firm, Long-Term Capital Management.
Gates, you see, has a non-leveraged investment of $50 billion in Microsoft. No borrowing, no margin debt, just plain old-fashioned ownership.
And a monopoly that doesn't need a bailout.
Meriwether, on the other hand, started in 1991 and took in money from speculators. He took the $2.2 billion and borrowed with it, hitting the $125 B in borrowed assets point. Then he and his rocket scientists essentially borrowed still more, using this $125 B to leverage $1.25 T. (T for "trillion.")
Not bad, going from $2.2 B to $1.25 T, a mere 500-fold increase.
Sheer unmitigated greed on the part of the banks, not knowing or forcing Meriwether to tell them. Over leveraging is what caused the Great Depression via the stock market collapse. ---guy Gosh, thank goodness they are loosening the bank/brokerage rules...not.