It's Time to Investigate Those Who Inflated the Bubble

"I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth..."

These great lines are from the poem, September 1, 1939, by W. H. Auden -- his ruminations as World War II began with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

I came upon them totally by chance as I was taking time from studying the stock and bond markets. They are in a must-have compendium called The Faber Book of English History in Verse, edited by Kenneth Baker. Although the words refer to another time, they apply with blazing ferocity to the stock market crash on the Nasdaq and the charlatanism that led up to it. Not so much "a low dishonest decade," but a very, very low dishonest 1998, 1999 and early 2000.

Clearly, the worst stock market debacle in the history of postwar America did not just happen by chance or by the greed of the masses, but it happened in large part because of conspiracy, incredible ignorance and greed in high places, and a federal regulatory failure of unique proportions. ...