Wall Street's core function is to perform a sort of financial alchemy, an incredibly complicated method of giving a lot of people what they want.

The 80's, an era when financial alchemy brought jaw-dropping wealth to a generation of Wall Streeters, can now be safely said to be over.

With a nod to Qwest's strained balance sheet, Mr. Seidenberg said the company "fails to explain the financial alchemy required to keep Qwest afloat."

And Mr. Ziegelman, in the peculiar financial alchemy of the housing market, stands to more than double his money.

While commercial banks have made it clear that they want to reduce their Latin loan portfolios, they still look with skepticism at the financial alchemy being proposed by Wall Street.

That's alot of financial alchemy.

Ponzi was convinced that he was a wizard who had stumbled upon a form of financial alchemy that had eluded others.

Its rules often reduce reported earnings, but they also mean that those earnings are much more likely to be real, not the product of financial alchemy.

But there is growing concern among some accounting professionals that many companies are relying on financial alchemy to burnish their results.

To portray itself as prosperous, it has resorted to some clever financial alchemy that papers over the problems - for now.