Some DUer savvy in financial markets/system/whatever you want call it explain to me why

I should not be thinking that the whole of this financial story has not been told and that the holes people are seeing int he reform law hide a bunch of stuff we don't know about. I've been listening over the past few days to various stories on reform and reports of what still needs to happen. I'm wondering if the right chink in the wall were removed, what we would be staring at. I get the sense that we can still all go crashing to the ground and very quickly. Another thing that occurs to me as I've listened to the "don't tax the rich" crowd caterwauling is that perhaps the rich don't even have wealth. Is it possible that there has been so much leveraging and ratcheting up of the markets to cover debt that all that remains for them as well is debt? I'm just feeling real uneasy here.

their wealth is tied up in real assets instead of paper. The big boys weren't the ones jumping out of windows in '29 and they're not going to now.

converted any thing near liquidity to cash or gold in 2008, and have since been buying up Real Estate.

As for the OP question - are there still chinks in the wall that can bring the whole thing tumbling down - in a word "Yes". But my favorite market observation is this - Every time a Wall St. crook is arrested and/or sentenced to prison the market responds positively. Additionally every time the Obama administration proposes tough new regulations, over all, the market responds positively

Now what does that tell you

Only 57 Trillion in the CDS of the 683.7 TRILLION ( notional amount) of the OTC DERIVATIVES market caused the 2008 financial global meltdown.

Now, THAT'S LEVERAGE, and the White House and Fed wants to keep guaranteeing the action with injections of Treasury assets. If a company had a debt/equity one-tenth that it wouldn't be able to find a market for its junk bonds.