Losses Try Investors’ Faith in Market

This stock market is like your worst hangover: You’re kicking yourself for being so stupid and your savings are gone.

After the “irrational exuberance” of the ‘90s, we are paying dearly for our fun. WorldCom Inc. is just the last straw. Not only have I lost money personally, I now find my pension company also had a lot of that stock.

People like me are never going to have faith in the market again unless these CEOs, CFOs and boards of directors are forced to give back the money they have stolen. It’s fine to tighten regulations on accounting firms, but those executives will feel no pain unless they have to return the money. They had exorbitant salaries and stock options that made them millions before the truth was found out about their companies.

Congress is a lot to blame for what has happened. They took millions from accounting lobbyists while keeping the Securities and Exchange Commission from enforcing regulations. Now they say they are shocked.

The only way for the market to regain people’s trust is for the money to be given back to employees, pensioners and shareholders. Otherwise, employees won’t agree to have their 401(k)s invested in it. At least when you buy a CD from an FDIC bank, you end up with what you put in, and that sounds like a pretty good deal. Jeanne H. Manning

Laguna Woods

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Massive stock market losses amounting to more than $6.5 trillion in recent years were not primarily the result of corporate fraud and accounting dirty tricks.

Sadly, they were the inevitable byproduct of unprecedented investor greed and stupidity, magnified by unrestrained optimism on the part of an excessively promotional Wall Street establishment shamelessly hyping overvalued stocks at their peak and a largely passive Federal Reserve that piously professed concern but did nothing to stem the speculative madness.

If history runs true to form, investors will have two decades or more to contemplate the damage done by their reckless disregard of risk. We’re in a weak recovery with puny profits and stock price indexes closer to valuation levels normally associated with bull market tops, not bear market bottoms.

Anthony Dent

Los Angeles