Consider the following:

This phenomenon of confusion ruling in a bullish market is not unique to the 1990s stock market.

Following the 1929 stock market crash, one of the biggest collapses, and a shocker to the investment world, was the bankruptcy of Middle West Utilities.

The company was run by Samuel Insull according to the prevailing, and confusing, structure of the time, “elaborate webs of holding companies, each helping hide the others’ financial weaknesses, an artifice strangely similar to what Enron did with its partnerships.”424 Following the bubble burst in the early 1970s, accounting firm Peat Marwick, Mitchell was censured for its failure to conduct proper audits of five companies that crashed after PMM had given the firms clean and ongoing entity opinions. After the October 1987 crash, Drexel, Burnham & Lambert, Michael Milken’s junk bond firm, collapsed along with a host of other companies and the savings and loan industry.425 What does this market history tell you about WorldCom? How could the employees in WorldCom who went along benefit from this information? What fears did these employees have?? p-9687