Asked by reporters if he thought LTCM would be the last hedge fund in need of rescue, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt said, "No, I doubt it."

In earlier questioning by Harvard University students, the man who sees his job as protecting investors was obviously uncomfortable with the bailout that was orchestrated last month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

"If you accept the notion that has been put forward by some of the participants in that affair that the unwinding of Long Term Capital would have created a systemic risk to our markets that could have worked to the detriment of America's investors, then the means would have justified the end," Levitt said.

"Would I have been happier to see a private sector solution tothis where Warren Buffett and his colleagues had succeeded in buying Long Term Capital? Probably, but again no taxpayer funds were involved here. The result was relatively orderly. I can't say whether systemic risk was involved," Levitt added, noting he was on a presidential panel studying the issue.

Headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, and headed by some of the most respected names on Wall Street and two Nobel economists, LTCM used $4 billion of capital as security to borrow $120 billion. It then leveraged that amount to borrow almost $1 trillion or nearly equivalent of the gross domestic product of China.

The almost totally unregulated hedge fund employed a kind of computer-driven arbitrage system that collapsed in what rapidly became illiquid investments.

The New York Fed engineered a $3.5-billion bailout of LTCM from its creditors including commercial banks and investment houses that would have faced even greater losses if the fund had been allowed to fail.