Danny Schechter - ColdType

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2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the
information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and
106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what
they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market.
These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent
of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few
shareholders.”
Financial power, they said, is now highly concentrated. With
so few dominant players, manipulation is more likely because
of fewer checks and balances
I soon realized I was not alone in puzzling over how markets
could be manipulated. I began looking into an official government
agency known as the “Plunge Protection Unit.”
I often thought about the alphabet of the financial crisis,
a lexicon of terms like “plunder” – I wrote a book taking off
on that idea – but, also related P words: pricing, panic and
plunge.
I think of this last one spelled this way: plungeeeeeee, as in
falling off a cliff. And the Encarta dictionary backs me up:
plunge |plənj|
verb
1 [ intrans. ] jump or dive quickly and energetically : our
daughters whooped as they plunged into the sea.
• Fall suddenly and uncontrollably: a car swerved to
avoid a bus and plunged into a ravine.
• Embark impetuously on a speech or course of action:
overconfident researchers who plunge ahead.
• Suffer a rapid decrease in value: their fourth-quarter
operating profit plunged 25%.
There are many experts who see this happening today as
the markets plunge in value with banks going down and very
little going up except prices, foreclosures and unemployment.