Biotech Values

[stuck_holder]

More OT - It didn't hit me until i read your post, but in terms of liquidity, who possibly has more of it than the Chinese, increasingly selling their wares to us North Americans & taking our greenbacks in return?

if i was the head of a government of the largest population on the planet, that was emerging as a fast-growing competitor to the free market economies of the west for the same important yet scarce resources (oil, metals & other commodities), committed to central planning & control, and denied from using some of that surplus cash to acquire strategic assets such as Unocal, but was permitted to put some money ($3B) into influential private equity hedge funds like Blackstone, i might look at leveraging my power (i.e. increasing liquidity) and attacking the softest part of the underbelly (eg. subprime mortgages) with the purpose of creating a liquidity crisis that threatens to if not actually lowers prices of certain if not all asset classes, so that i can later swoop in and use some of my huge liquidity and acquire such assets at a considerable discount...

sorry if this sounds ultra-conspiratorialist, but what safeguards are there to prevent someone large enough (like a chinese government with huge foreign reserves of $US - maybe up to a trillion now?) from precipitating an actual (or contrived) crisis to secure their longer term objectives?

i think their version of the golden rule is whoever has the gold makes the rules...

sorry for the OT, rfj, have you started that new thread yet?