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Minimum requirement for traders: $100 million in assets.

Any private firm can list on Nasdaq’s new platform, which is called the Portal Market, and raise money by selling stock to an elite group of shareholders. These companies would remain private and not have to make public their financial statements or submit to federal regulation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate accountability law.

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The boom in private money has become so important to the financial system that major investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Citigroup are setting up rival private stock markets of their own. But none will be as large as Portal, which will list the shares of about 500 firms on its first day of trading.

Ordinary investors can only participate indirectly if their mutual fund creates an account to trade on the private markets.

These markets are creating an alternative and exclusive investment world buffeted from the turmoil that has roiled the major stock indicators in recent weeks. In the public markets, investors dumped stock during a credit crisis caused by the deteriorating mortgage industry. Private-market traders generally are sophisticated financial groups that take a long-term view of their investments.

“One of the problems that business faces in America today is what I would call ‘short-termism,’ ” said Howard S. Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital, an investment firm that was the first to list on the private market developed by Goldman Sachs called GSTrUE. “There’s a lot of expense and complication associated with being a public company today. . . . Now it is possible to gain most of the advantages of being public while sidestepping the disadvantages.”

The private market, Marks said, shields companies from regulation and from wild swings in their share prices that are caused by a temporary drop in earnings or a bad rumor.

In just a few years, Nasdaq officials predict, stock offerings on private markets will far exceed IPOs on public exchanges.

“It’s a transformational development in the capital markets,” John Jacobs, executive vice president of Nasdaq, said of Portal’s arrival.

The rise of private money has created a new class of powerbrokers on Wall Street who have enriched themselves even as they have provided billions of investment dollars to companies in all kinds of industries. But the trend is causing a backlash among working-class Americans who generally are shut out from investing directly in those circles, said Colin Blaydon, director of the Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship.

“While there has been great value creation in the American economy, it has not gone to the large bulk of American citizens,” Blaydon said. “It has gone to the very top slice — and I mean the very top slice — with no increase of real incomes of American workers, including the middle-class management class. And that is something that people sense in their guts. They know they are not better off, and yet there are a handful of people who are extraordinarily better off.”

Portal is the first centralized private stock market for an elite class of investors called Qualified Institutional Buyers, or “QIBs,” that was created in 1990 by securities rule 144A. This law defined QIBs as investing institutions with at least $100 million in assets. It also allowed private companies to raise money by selling shares only to QIBs and remain exempt from regulatory scrutiny. These firms, however, disclose their financial statements to their investors.

Since they began, QIBs have only been able to trade in the old-fashioned way: calling each other over the phone and negotiating a price. They had no way to trade shares on an exchange. No electronic system existed that could give them instant updates on the price of a firm’s stock or the number of shares traded each day.

Now, with Portal and other private markets, these investors can log onto a secure Web site and get a wealth of data on a company’s stock. They can trade shares by clicking a few buttons. Stock prices are updated automatically.

Analysts say the new ease-of-use is another incentive for super-wealthy investing groups to shun the public markets and focus on making money in the private sphere.

The Bush administration has chosen to move against the Revolutionary Guard Corps because of what U.S. officials have described as its growing involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its support for extremists throughout the Middle East, the sources said. The decision follows congressional pressure on the administration to toughen its stance against Tehran, as well as U.S. frustration with the ineffectiveness of U.N. resolutions against Iran’s nuclear program, officials said.

The designation of the Revolutionary Guard will be made under Executive Order 13224, which President Bush signed two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to obstruct terrorist funding. It authorizes the United States to identify individuals, businesses, charities and extremist groups engaged in terrorist activities. The Revolutionary Guard would be the first national military branch included on the list, U.S. officials said — a highly unusual move because it is part of a government, rather than a typical non-state terrorist organization.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

“We had previously thought the market would return to some semblance of order and that our clients would not join in the panic,” Sentinel wrote in a letter to clients CNBC said it had obtained. “Unfortunately this has not been the case.”

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Price cuts, markdowns to clear out unsold goods, and the mix of merchandise contributed to the contraction, Chief Financial Officer Tom Schoewe said during the company’s recorded earnings call.

“U.S. consumers continue to be under difficult pressure economically,” Scott said on the call. “It is no secret that many customers are running out of money toward the end of the month.”

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

Mr Walker’s views carry weight because he is a non-partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often described as the investigative arm of the US Congress.

While most of its studies are commissioned by legislators, about 10 per cent – such as the one containing his latest warnings – are initiated by the comptroller general himself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Walker said he had mentioned some of the issues before but now wanted to “turn up the volume”. Some of them were too sensitive for others in government to “have their name associated with”.

“I’m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake-up call,” he said. “As comptroller general I’ve got an ability to look longer-range and take on issues that others may be hesitant, and in many cases may not be in a position, to take on.

“One of the concerns is obviously we are a great country but we face major sustainability challenges that we are not taking seriously enough,” said Mr Walker, who was appointed during the Clinton administration to the post, which carries a 15-year term.

The fiscal imbalance meant the US was “on a path toward an explosion of debt”.

“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks,” said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm.

The Aeroscraft ML866 offers 120 knots top speed and over 5,000 square feet of interior compartment. The helicopter like vertical takeoff and landing capability and ability to operate from unprepared fields enhance the scope of the Aeroscraft by enabling access to remote areas anywhere in the world. It also offers independence from large or medium airports which will keep travelers away from clogged international terminals and congested highways and get passengers underway quicker.

That two-decade shrink-the-government trend now appears over, if for no other reason than demographics. The aging baby-boomer generation is poised to receive big payments from Social Security and government healthcare programs.

“New Deal programs persist,” despite the Reagan revolution and its aftermath, says James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas in Austin. “They persist because they are largely successful and highly popular.”