Originally Posted by host

I'm a trader in securities operating as a sole proprietor, under US Tax code provision <a href="http://www.traderstatus.com/mark2mkt.htm">475(f)</a>and I took time out from planning my stock and options trades for tomorrow to author this thread.

My specialty is short selling and lately it's been my kind of market.

DO you understand that the Fed thinks the retail investor is stupid enough not to perceive that Bear Stearns is bankrupted, as long the Fed was able to impose a $2 per share "buy out" of Bear by JP Morgan Chase?

Bear Stearns experienced a "run" on it's customers accounts, last week. It happened at a level of sophistication where there were no opportunities for TV cameras to video the customers lined up outside Bear Stearns HQ to make withdrawals, as we saw at Countrywide bank last year. Countrywide Bank is also one of the Fed's dwindling number of primary dealers. What kind of financial shape do you suspect that it is in?

The run on Bear was accomplished with outgoing wire transfer requests.

This is now a desperate battle to shore up "investor confidence". The goal was to force Bear to opt for the $2.00 offer before the markets open in Asia tonight. There isn't much difference between $2.00 and bankruptcy, and bankruptcy would have delayed the layoffs of many of Bear's !4,000 employees and probably been more favorable, under a non-intervention scenario, to the top executives at Bear, than this deal is going to work out to be.

The Fed does not want Bear's assets liquidated and it does not want details of Bear's financial state filed in a public bankruptcy court proceeding. The details get buried in the combined JP Morgan Bear merged "entity".

So now we watch to see if the public hold their stocks or cough them up.

The Fed will claim everything is A-OK even when the DOW 30 index drops another 5000 points. It's down just 3000 points since last September.

Either way, the public will bear the costs of the serial string of Fed "bailouts" that will be coming along soon, as well as the lost stock portfolio and home valuation that is also going to come down hard on the upper middle class.

I think you are off topic, Lebell, and that you have been off topic in almost all of your posts on this forum since your return.