This is what happens when you bounce a $25 million check:

All afternoon yesterday the news was filled with the story coming out of New Jersey. Who could pass this one up when some of the 44 people arrested were rabbis and three others were city mayors? According to The New York Times, the governor said, "The scale of corruption we're seeing as this unfolds is simply outrageous and cannot be tolerated." Please note the strategic use of the word "scale." Think your community is immune to corruption? My guess is that it's the scale that's keeping it under wraps.

How to make money on Wall Street even in the worst of times:

One way to do it is to begin with a large pot of gold right from the get-go. You start buying up stock in a company, which in turn causes the price to go up. Then you sell the stock when other investors start to chase the stock whose price you're driving up.

There are two tricks to this. One, you have to have money to begin with, and two, you have to do the buying and selling very fast before other investors catch on to the manipulation. Investors have a new weapon in the arsenal to aid with the latter: super high speed computers running clever algorithms that do the decision making for them. They can buy and sell within milliseconds, manipulating the market place faster than the eye can blink.

Interestingly, the value of stock now has little if anything to do with the actual value of the companies they represent. (Read The New York Times' story.)