Students learn from Wall Street woes

By Alex Cameron, NEWS 9

OKLAHOMA CITY -- One of the nation's largest banks filed for bankruptcy, another was forced to sell itself, and the world's largest insurance company planned a major restructuring.

According to financial experts, Monday's sliding stocks is further proof that the economy is hurting, but they also said, it shows that the economy is working the way it's designed to work.

"There's no reason for people to panic," Oklahoma City University Business School Dean Vince Orza said.

Orza said, unless investors did business with Lehman Brothers, which filed for bankruptcy Monday, or Merrill Lynch, which was purchased by Bank of America, none of the stock exchanges should impact them. Indirectly, however, Orza said it affects us all, as it is yet another blow to the nation's economy.

"We have an economy that is losing steam, we have unemployment rates that are going up, we have interest rates that are going up," Orza said.

Orza said the banks' carelessness with regard to the sub-prime mortgages is likely to strike again.

"They didn't make people justify their income to say they really could afford the home they were buying," Orza said.

Dr. James Ma used Monday's Wall Street meltdown as a teaching tool in his corporate finance class.

"We all know a company can run into trouble when a balance sheet is not balanced," Ma said.

Ma said his students were attentive to the lesson.

"They want to know what's going on because it has an impact on their personal life, on their parent's life, on their future career choices," Ma said.

Orza told the students with the rising interest rates and the bank failures, the economy is operating as it was designed to function.

"This is how the economy corrects itself, this is free enterprise and supply and demand working," Orza said.