slade – how much money would it take to affect the American economy? To buy enough stock in a company like Bear Stearns or Lehman or Merrill Lynch, so that you could control its pricing on the market, and then suddenly dump, so a cascade effect would take place bringing all the rest of the stock prices down and into bankruptcy?

My understanding is there is some fairly hinky stuff going on with the pricing of these stocks over and above decades of bad management. The article(s) I have read seem to think that no one really knows who owns how much of what stocks so that when massive amounts of them suddenly start being sold at bottom-level prices, no one is sure who started the avalanche.

So … if there *were* a plot to take down Lehman Brothers, for example, how much would that cost? Surely these companies that are going belly-up are not *all* populated with Enron-type people gaming the system.