Trust goes down the drain

`` It appears that US financial authorities have been overly influenced by their European counterparts and have chosen to effectively nationalize troubled companies. That process did not work in Japan where banks remain moribund more than a decade after these efforts began in earnest, nor in countries like France where banks seem to lurch from one crisis to the next. Thankfully, market circuit-breakers in the US still work wherein the firms being asked to buy troubled investment banks are exerting their own pressure on price - as JPMorgan showed by offering a price of $2 per share rather than the $30 closing price (or even the $20 that the weekend press indicated). ''