The perceptive and common sense-rooted Ben Stein, in a business column in The New York Times, has weighed-in on the credit crisis, and for market absolutists, it's an argument they probably don't want to hear.

Stein, like many of us, has pondered how the massively well-paid men and women of Wall Street could create such a catastrophe. How did some of the smartest, talented executives, Stein ruminates, generate such immense losses that "they made banks clam up on lending -- at great risk to the economy?"

Compelling questions

Stein asks: Where were the fail-safe devices? The government watchdogs? The ratings agencies? A speech by Greenlight Capital hedge fund manager David Einhorn at a Grant's Interest Rate Observer event, provided the answers -- the unfortunate truths of the recent housing/credit boom -- which Stein summarized:

Billionaire investor George Soros believes the current financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression, and said stocks have not bottomed yet, Bloomberg News reported Thursday.

Soros said the most recent market bottom "will probably not prove to be the final bottom," adding that the current stock rebound will last six weeks to three months as the United States moves closer to recession, Bloomberg News reported.

Further, Soros, in an op-editorial column in The Financial Times, argued that the cause of the market's current problems is a flawed premise: the belief that markets are self-correcting and tend toward equilibrium. They aren't and don't, Soros argues, and the laissez-faire policy creates bubbles, including the most-recent housing bubble, which, in turn, when it started to burst, led to the current credit crunch.

Soros cites deregulation

Soros added that the market's current troubles originated in 1980 when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led a laissez-faire movement that reduced/eliminated regulation of banks and financial markets, the FT reported.

Banks are demanding more capital from hedge funds to support outstanding loans resulting in the dissolution of some funds forced to liquidate assets, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

``If you have leverage, you're stuffed,'' Alex Allen, chief investment officer of London-based Eddington Capital Management Ltd., which has $195 million invested in hedge funds for clients, told Bloomberg News. Allen said the crisis is like a bank panic turned upside down with bankers, not depositors, concerned they won't get their money back. He added there are likely to be more collateral /margin-related liquidations of hedge funds in the weeks ahead.

The $2 trillion hedge fund industry is in the throes of its worst capital crunch since the Federal Reserve successfully encouraged the securities industry to provide $3.6 billion to bail-out Long Term Capital Management L.P. in 1998. Amplified by leverage and aided by innovative investment formulas, many hedge funds generated outstanding returns for much of this decade, often aided by high-performing asset-backed securities. However, as the housing market slowed and mortgage-backed securities began to fail, hedge funds started to experience the down side of their deployed leverage: banks and other counterparties who lent money for these investments had the right to and initiated requests that hedge funds put up more capital. Hedge funds that could not meet the capital requirement have been liquidated.

The stock market has been experiencing a tremendous amount of turbulence over the past three weeks. We have seen wide swings in the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU) of hundreds of points up, and then down, and back up and back down. Today,the Dow had its second-worst loss of the year. If you are losing sleep or getting a queasy stomach over any of this then your portfolio is not right for you. You have made big mistakes in allocating your capital and you need to make a change.

Anybody that has been investing for any period of time has been told to be diversified, or even more simply -- do not put all your eggs in one basket. After each market swing Wall Street prognosticators, be they analysts, brokers, media talking heads or us at BloggingStocks attempts to rationally explain what is happening in the market. Some times the explanations make sense, and sometimes they do not. But, it is important to remember that even when the explanation is rational, plausible, and backed up with a few facts IT CAN BE WRONG!

There are many aspects of the stock market that replicate gambling. The most important one of them all is this: Do not play with money you cannot afford to lose! You should consider diversity of risk and limiting risk to levels that allow you to be at peace with your decisions. Diversification does not mean you need to own a large quantity of stocks or funds. You can be diversified with as few as four or five stocks as long as they are not in the same industry. You can be diversifed in just one mutual fund, if that fund includes diversification as one of its goals.

Leverage, the use of borrowed money for investing, goes in and out of favor. When times are good and people are making money, it's great. It amplifies returns (positive or negative) and, particularly in real estate, can lead to mind-bogglingly high return on investment numbers. But the downside is also huge, as anyone who lost a job in the wake of a failed leveraged buyout of the 1980s found out.

My summary of the positives and negatives of leverage is this: Everything that's good about leverage is also bad about leverage.

Having said that, this paragraph from Saturday's New York Times scares the bejesus out of me: Let's say you are very wealthy and have $25 million to invest in a portfolio of hedge funds. Banks like BNP Paribas, Royal Bank of Canada, or Barclays will leverage your investment, say four to one, allowing you to invest $100 million, using derivatives. Barclays estimates that roughly $60 billion to $80 billion in leverage is being put on by investors in hedge funds or funds of hedge funds. Other market players say it is more than double that.

Then you add that leverage to the leverage that the hedge funds are already using. It's like buying stock on the margin, on the margin. And I don't even know what that means. But that's what it's like. Of course, like all leverage, this will be fine as long as the markets are fine, which is kind of like saying driving 120 miles per hour is fine as long as you don't hit anything.

If markets go south, people undoubtedly are going to look back on this leverage on steroids and say "What were we thinking?"

The "Heard on the Street" column in last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal (registration required) talked about a growing trend of companies borrowing large amounts of money to pay dividends. When I started writing for BloggingStocks several months ago, one of the first pieces I wrote was called A rally of declining yields: Should you care? If you read that piece, you will get a good idea how I feel about dividends.

Let's take a logical look at the idea of borrowing money to pay a dividend: A company borrows money at an interest rate which, however low, will likely be substantially higher than what an investor would earn with a savings account (even if it is a high-yield account such as those offered by EmigrantDirect and ING Direct). So, assuming the investor puts the money in a savings account, he is effectively borrowing money at X% to invest it at X-2%. This is not a good deal.

But let's assume that the investor doesn't put it in a savings. Let's say he decides to put it in his favorite stock that he considers to be undervalued. Let's say he puts it in the stock that paid the dividend. If he does that, he will essentially have been charged a hefty tax to plow the money back into the company. This is also not a good deal.

In cases where a company's management believes the stock is undervalued and the company is financially stable, borrowing money to buy back shares can be a good way to increase shareholder value. But, in my opinion, borrowing money to pay a dividend never makes sense.

The reason the market has fallen so much in the last month may not be what you think. Today I spoke with a senior investment strategist for a $1 trillion mutual fund complex. In his view, the market's recent fall has less to do with concerns about inflation and much more to do with hedge fund trading.

Specifically, he thinks that hedge funds -- whose managers Vanity Fair reports are building enormous Greenwich, Conn. spreads -- have been borrowing money to buy commodities such as gold, copper, and oil as well as real estate and emerging markets stocks. They mistakenly assumed that the Fed would continue to act as though inflation was benign.

When Fed Chief Ben Bernanke expressed concern about inflation, the hedge funds' leveraged commodity bets suddenly went sour. The dollar toned up and commodities tumbled -- forcing the hedge funds to cover their leveraged bets by selling their long positions in commodities. Gold has tumbled 19% to $591 an ounce since reaching a 26-year peak in May. The Indian Sensex market index has lost over 25% of its value -- plunging from 12,612 on May 10 to 8,994 on June 13.