not a bad day, page-4

Any banker, trader or investor asked to invent the perfect market environment for creating wealth beyond the wildest dreams of avarice would come up with conditions askin to those of the past decade. So what went wrong?

The financial community, through greed, stupidity and hubris, has fouled its own sandpit. The era of munificent money- making conditions -- gentle regulation, ever-faster information flows, freely available credit, unprecedented access to global investors and oil-enriched buyers of anything yielding north of zero -- is ending with an almighty bang, not a whimper.

Realtors appraised homes at fictitious levels. Lenders granted mortgages to people who couldn't pay. Bankers created Frankenstein instruments they couldn't value. Traders invented prices they couldn't justify. And investors bought securities they didn't understand.

Since its inception, the derivatives market has echoed the fairground hawker's call to ``scream if you want to go faster.'' Every time Microsoft Corp. upgraded its Excel spreadsheet software to accommodate more cells, rows and columns, the structured finance guys were able to graft yet more layers of complexity onto their products.