If you’d like to know what gives me schadenfreude, look no further than this:"
Now many of the investors are stuck with securities that pay ridiculously low yields. In some cases, the securities will never mature, so the investors will never get their money back unless they sell them for a fraction of what they paid. Those who thought they were being safe and cautious in fact were taking huge risks.
The biggest losers so far are corporations that bought the paper but now find they are not covered by settlements some Wall Street firms made to reimburse individual investors. But there are still individuals who are stuck with the securities, either because their brokerage firm refused to settle or because they moved from one firm to another and found that neither firm was willing to reimburse them.
Some of those corporate purchasers may recall the old saying, “Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.” Those buyers of this paper are finding they cannot successfully sue because of a 1995 law that was strongly backed by corporate America as a way to curb frivolous lawsuits.
Source: High and Low Finance - When Law Obscures the Facts of the Auction-Rate Debacle - NYTimes.com
The best part is that if tort “reform” laws hurt enough wealthy corporations, they’ll be repealed.