When is a Loss not a Loss? In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 24 Sep 1998 10:43:26 -0400 To whom..., A loss, it seems, even in this great bastion of market-rationality, risk-management and (gulp) transparency (except for hedge funds, playgrounds of the Gods) is not a question of what you owe, but whom you know. Thus is revealed the eternal achilles heel of capitalism. No matter how they try to sanitize the system, they cannot undo the instability that having so much wealth in so few hands creates. Capitalism's greatest geniuses can't smooth out the wrinkles and they have to go whining to their rich pals. What a bunch of cowards. That Meriwether, Merton and Scholes, gurus of analytical finance capitalism, should be laid low by the Russian nomenklatura is an irony so rich it's practically proof of the existence of God. peace