Greenspan Gooses Wall Street

• The wholesale, instant manipulation of major financial markets, such as the U.S. stock exchange, is difficult and usually requires large-scale covert federal meddling in moments of crisis.

As this issue of The SPOTLIGHT went to press, confidential sources have supplied this newspaper with an internal memorandum from the office of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

The document appears to contain hard evidence confirming the Fed has repeatedly intervened to halt massive breakdowns on Wall Street and did so again last week, when stocks plunged and set off panic selling.

Propping up supposedly "free" markets in such an artificial and under handed way is prohibited both by federal law and by New York state regulations.

In the meantime, it should be noted that rigging the price of particular shares -- rather than entire markets -- is the constant preoccupation of speculators such as former junk-bond swindler Michael Milken or the late Robert Maxwell, a publishing tycoon who built a worldwide media empire on crooked stock and bond deals.

"If you took a look at Maxwell on any given day," says veteran Wall Street equity strategist Paul Tiller, "you would see him trying to buy out the underpriced stock of this or that company with money he had borrowed against the overpriced shares of another company."

In the end, Maxwell's financial domain collapsed amid scandals involving not just billion-dollar stock and bond swindles, but the theft of employee pension funds and sinister links to the Mossad, Israel's secret service.

"And that is just the trouble with the way the Fed is meddling in Wall Street," warned Tiller. "It may look like a quick fix, but in reality this sort of intrusion corrupts the markets and ultimately leads to a hideous, generalized breakdown."