Dear Dale Wharton: The case against the investment bankers discussed by Seldes was eventually dismissed in 1953 in a famous decision by the infamous judge Harold Medina, who found that the 17 investment banking defendants "went their own and several ways" and that no conspiracy was every carried out by the defendants. Medina completely ignored the evidence of tacit collusion and the ways in which oligopolists lead, follow, meet prices and evolve systems of "conscious parallelism of action" to avoid crude conspiracy and to allow establishment hacks like Medina to protect their oligopolistic behavior. The decision was no surprise--the system works. Sincerely, Ed Herman