What Mr. Bergers' focus should be on, as well as possibly the focus of a special congressional committee, was the role of rating agencies such as S&P. Moodys, and others, in the collapse of the stock market and the subsequent loss of the retirment wealth of hundreds of thousands of Amercians.

A great deal of blame for the collapse of the Stock Market should be pinned on the Rating Agencies, Ironically the same agencies that Downgraded the Rating of the US Federal Debt Intruments (which was a totally hypocritical move in "posturing". The broad onset of Synthetic Securites which were created initially and largely by Lehman Brothers - Asset Based securities, "Mortgaged backed", should have meant that the rating agencies based the credit worthiness rating of each these new securities on the actual riskiness of the individual mortgages which were "pooled" together to create these issues, because not all mortgages and mortgage pools were alike.

When the housing market headed south, millions of borrowers started defaulting on their loans, and because of these new Synthetic securities, for the first time in our history, the US Stoc kMarket was now linked to the US Housing Market, so they both collapsed together wiping out hundreds of thousands of Americans retirment savings. If the Rating Agencies were being properly supervised by the SEC and Congress, the RAs would have been forced to rate subprime mortgage pools accurately as CCC, or C- debt which would  have broadly stopped thousands of mutual funds from investing in such "crappy" investment vehicles.

Insetad of doing this, Moddys, S&P, and Fitch, just merely "looked through" to the credit worthiness of the issuer of these synthetic securities, such as the Credit worthiness of Lehman Borthers, which was considered excellent, AAA. A1+. the highest available rating, becasue in their minds Lehman Brothers could never "Fail" and so all of the securities they issued were rubber stamped AAA, or A1+, when in fact at the end of the crisis, banks were foolishly giving mortgages to almost anyone regardless of the borrowers ability to pay these mortgages back.

Consequently many mutual funds which contained the Retirment savings of hundreds of thousands of Americans were now buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Asset backed andMortgage Backed securities, some of which were still being rated AAA by the Rating Agencies when in fact many of these pools were made up of risky, subprime loans from areas like Detroit, Las Vegas, and the lower income areas of Florida.

Mr. Bergers, Good luck, and on a side note, keep track of your buisness cards.