> In the case where actual prosecution was conducted, as you suggest - what would be the opening price on the Monday morning for the share price? Bear Sterns pe

> In the case where actual prosecution was conducted, as you suggest - what would be the opening price on the Monday morning for the share price? Bear Sterns peak valuation was 20billion, Facebook sits at 1,000billion. The stock market is mot the same as the synthetic derivatives market. One of the main reasons we had such a problem with synthetic derivatives, is that it hid the fact that a lot of these instruments were worth much less than thought, so when it was realized the extremely troubles housing market was linked in a way that wasn't quite understood previously, a whole bunch of losses were realized after the fact. There's a huge difference to that than any other sort of news. The biggest difference is that in the case of Facebook at an announcement of a prosecution, the stocks of Facebook have the exact same value immediately after, and only start dropping as people start selling, and respond to how people react. Unlike synthetic derivatives, there is no inherent value backing it (which normally you would think is worse, but when that inherent value is made of or mortgages and a large chunk have used legal means to wipe out their debt, that value is forever eroded). The simple answer to the price is it would drop, but over some time. Some people would wait for more info, or think they could beat the case. Those people that laft would invest their money somewhere else. Some would put it in non-tech stocks, others would choose tech stocks they thought immune from the coming shift in privacy (if that's what the prosecution seemed to foretell). The important thing is that most wealth would not be destroyed, but just shifted to somewhere else. For synthetic derivatives, what's not what would have happened. Bear Sterns failing entirely would have meant that any of their repackaged derivatives would have also had problems. Everyone was sitting on investments (CDOs) where they couldn't easily tell if they had lost 5% or 10% or 50% of the value because it was repackaged so many times, and there was a real concern that other companies would fall like dominoes as the few percent worse the Bear Sterns/Lehman Brothers situations made it, which in turn exacerbate others. As for Facebook and the NASDAQ, I think you'd see a far lower impact. Even if the equivalent of 5% of NASDAQ's cap was lost from Facebook, I think a large chunk of that would flow to other stocks on NASDAQ. Facebook's loss is other company's gain. Probably Apple's, I would think, for people that still want that portion of investment in tech but want something less likely to be negatively impacted because of more stringent privacy requirements.