fred said:

“It has been established that the World Bank computers and databases have been broken into during the past year. Also, every day for the last six trading sessions EXACTLY one hour before close of the markets in New York massive computer generated trades would come in to roil the markets.”

Rather than a political conspiracy theory, how about some kind of half-assed greed based conspiracy theory, i.e. someone deliberately roiled the markets in an attempt to make money.

I can’t buy into the Soros theory because Soros doesn’t control enough money (he would have to bet billions of his own money to be significant). Also the events have been so nonlinear that little is predictable. Case in point, the US stock market has been plunging while the US dollar has been appreciating (gold has been dropping). Who could predict that? If the Soviet Union was still in business, I might be willing to believe they destabilized the world’s market. The Chinese could conceivably cause this. However the Chinese like making money and this market crisis is causing them to lose money. There are no obvious winners.