To fix the economy legislation needs to be enacted (or reversed, as the case may be) in order to disallow lending firms any association with investment firms. Such associations (such as Bank of America and its affiliate, Banc of America) are an obvious conflict of interest in that more profit is to be had by using (or, as the executive flakes would say, "leveraging") the market bending capabilities of the lending side of the house by loosening credit and then tightening credit at will after having created some excuse to do so and blowing it all out of proportion so it won't be immediately obvious. How? Well there are many possibilities here using the investment side of the house to supply capital into any one of these possibilities. For example, create a fund which will draw investors to a no lose proposition based on futures contracts which can now be manipulated at will by the tightening or loosening of the credit markets and a certain undue influence in the reporting of financial news to be sure the timing works out as planned. Of course the investment firm will be the direct investor in these futures and the middleman to the investors buying shares in a fund of derivitive securities, so will pay pennies on the dollar to the investors actually putting up the monies. A certain amount of corroboration among these financial companies also would do nicely, which possibility is hardly unthinkable among these "competitors" but, even so, not altogether necessary. This is but one of many possible ways to "leverage" such control over markets.