What has been forgotten is one major cause of the crisis ­- unregulated speculation on the prices of securities by people who did not own them. These betting parlours, or fake exchanges, were called bucket shops because the bets were literally placed in buckets.

The states responded in 1908 by passing anti-bucket shop and gambling laws, outlawing the activity that helped to ruin that economy.

Naked shorting of stocks is only slightly different from what occurred in the bucket shops and, since Bear Sterns, the SEC has only enforced a ban on naked shorts, over great protest, for relatively brief periods of extreme instability and for specific classes of stocks---financial institutions.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."