Word: boom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Laconia, the hall was packed and sprinkled with plaid; the crowd was ready to shop for something new. Without so much as a stumble, Alexander delivered the smoothest speech since Clinton's State of the Union. By targeting Clinton he gave voters a taste of what a Southern, baby-boom Governor match would look like. "This is a President who reads a book one night and tries everything in it the next day, who feels it's necessary to work out his midlife crisis in public," he said. The crowd laughed; then came the coup de grace...
...wealth comes from initial public offerings of stock, or IPOs, which are experiencing an unprecedented boom in the great bull market of the past two years. As the stock market has smashed records, more and more private firms, particularly technology companies, have decided to raise cash by selling equities to the public. More capital was raised in IPOs by emerging high-tech firms in 1995--$8.4 billion--than in any other year in U.S. history. And when an IPO is successful, the people who already hold shares in the company make out well. Sometimes very well. Sometimes unbelievably well...
Those setbacks were not isolated incidents in the supercharged stock market that has made IPOs the hottest way to raise money in the 1990s, just as junk bonds and cheap credit fueled the stock boom of a decade ago. The junk binge left the U.S. with a colossal hangover of corporate debt, and the IPO fever inspires some worries about the country's financial and economic health. Among other things, it raises the issue of whether a casino-like mentality tends to lure investors into high-risk and even dubious new issues, or tempt start-ups to race to market...
...here," says Daniel Miller, managing director of the $20 billion Putnam group of mutual funds, based in Boston. "The first things thrown out in a bad market are the newer ipos." The risks only grow when mutual-fund managers--the institutional investors who are driving much of the stock boom--find themselves with little time to evaluate new issues. Nearly 40 new companies went public the week of Dec. 10 alone, as many as might have made their debut in an entire quarter a decade ago. "When 40 IPOs are priced in a week, there is no way a money...
...extracting meaning from a flood of apparently chaotic information known as 'data mining.' "For example," says Dowell, "if you have a sudden run on beds and axes in Minnesota stores, and can't figure out why, data mining might tell you that there has been a sudden forestry boom and that lumber jacks are now setting up new camps. Applications could range from air traffic control to playing the stock market, or taking chess as a model, even to the next...