Wa Mu mun & Wa mu pin

We were discussing about the great Wa-Mu debacle during this weekends weekly call with my classmates..What catches our fancy is a company which has a 119 year history drops off a cliff from $35 to a $1 stock in a year and 60 - 90% downside in a day.. The consensus among us was clear. US banks have been taking investors for a ride. And that no one in the US is secure. That the confidence in US investment is at its lowest ebb..
Being retail investors, we will never invest in the US stock market, however lucrative the propects appear to be. Ones life saving is wiped off in just an hour leaving no exit route for retail investors to get off the stock once fundamentals are cleaned up.
Who are to be blamed for the debacle. Not the banks,not the investors, PE funds, I-Banks , but the credit rating agencies who gave their blind ratings based upon their utopian research staff. After this "suave" experience, investors who have been brought to the streets, should sue these credit rating agencies for misleading investors into buying these complex financial instruments.
Contrast this to the Indian stock exchanges where circuit limits are imposed twice per day to ward off any unforeseen imbalance, i would be less surprised to see such a knee jerk reaction and a swift change in price action for a security as RBI and SEBI can ward off any such disturbances.
A bank which has $188 bn ( Washington Mutual ) in deposits alone gets sold off for a paltry for $1.9 bn to the government. Huh !!!! If i were CEO of TCS ( http://www.tcs.com/), i would have used my companies one quarter revenue to buy into this bank and use this oppurtunity to expand a firm footprint in the US and provide much business to my company through IT enablement. ( sigh) ..An oppurtunity lost..
This decade would well go into the annals of the US history as Wa Mu mun and Wa Mu pin...

Read this at the end of this article about people who are still believing in the US stock market.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122256922970483051.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

People should learn to love animals...


They are so tasty...