Conversion seems to be a big problem: in the case of the Sungshan complex, which collapsed into itself, the superintendent of the residential part of the building says a bank that rented out the first two floors had stripped the steel columns of concrete reinforcement during renovations earlier this year.
As a financier, he was a little too imaginative: His complex pyramid of holding companies collapsed in the Depression, even as the underlying electric operations remained financially robust.
Now that conservative orthodoxy has collapsed in a heap of complex derivatives, I can't help but think what a refreshing dose of plain-spoken Midwestern reality Mr. Geoghegan could bring to the nation as a whole.
Six years after the lessons of Enron and a decade after Long-Term Capital collapsed, regulators still can't seem to blunt the damage complex securities can have on financial markets.