Word: bonding
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...Last week four blue-chip companies, including Dow Chemical and ^ American Express, unveiled a new financial product that could become a deterrent to corporate raiders. The firms will buy back as much as $5.6 billion worth of their shares with so-called unbundled stock units: packages that include a bond and two new types of securities. Partly because the new packages will allow the companies to pay less in taxes, investors might bid up the price of the new units. Raiders, Wall Streeters believe, might resist paying such a premium, thus foiling takeover bids...
...gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, private eye and public conscience, sitting behind his pebbled-glass door with an office bottle and a solitary game of chess. What made Marlowe special was simply the fact that he was nothing special, no genius like Sherlock Holmes, no Connoisseur model like James Bond. Just an underpaid drudge with, as one mobster says, "no dough, no family, no prospects, no nothing" -- except a habit of making other people's worries his own, and a gift for walking in on corpses he knows just well enough to mourn...
Milken's junk-bond department, which he moved from Manhattan to Beverly Hills not long after he formed it a decade ago, quickly became the engine of the Wall Street firm's furious growth. One reason is that junk bonds earn hefty fees: Drexel charges 3% to 4% of an offering's total value, compared with a fee of less than 1% for a higher-grade issue. Milken's web of buyers and sellers for the bonds has given him a virtual lock on the market, though the entry of such competitors as Morgan Stanley and First Boston has whittled...
...office at 9560 Wilshire Boulevard by 4:30 a.m. each day in a chauffeur- driven Mercedes, Milken holds forth in a trading room the size of a basketball court. He has no private office, preferring to sit at one of three huge, X- shaped desks, where 30 bond traders and other workers shout into telephones and scramble to execute the orders that he barks out or scrawls on yellow legal pads. On the computer terminal next to his, a co-worker has posted a sign reading MENTAL ILLNESS IS ESSENTIAL TO SUCCESS...
Bankers, too, are taking a harder look at the risks, and some junk-bond buyers are becoming picky. While cash has poured in from such staid investors as the Harvard and Yale endowment funds and many state pension plans, other money managers are refusing to play. Says New York City comptroller Harrison Goldin, who oversees the investment of some $30 billion in pension funds: "I cannot condone activities that divert so much time and energy from investments that create new jobs and opportunities to those that reshuffle chairs. Pension-fund managers are supposed to invest in the American economy...