Word: bulls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other side of Capitol Hill, the President's chief inquisitor on such issues as the Democratic fund-raising scandal will be a man who has never pretended to be impartial. Dan Burton has described himself as a partisan "pit bull," and once performed a re-enactment of Vince Foster's death by shooting bullets into a "headlike object" in his own yard. But the G.O.P. Congressman from Indianapolis insists he wants to make a fresh start in January, when he will take command of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, the panel that does most of the investigating...
...years, the securities industry in the U.S. and elsewhere has been host to fast-buck brokerage firms that have ridden the back of the bull market like so many parasites. Typically, they hype penny stocks in tiny companies that are all promise and no delivery and then close up shop when the market hiccups or the regulators catch on, leaving gullible investors to count their losses...
...company now pays such a stingy dividend that the yield, which is the dividend divided by the stock price, is less than 2%--a payout so low it had been considered imponderable for most of this century. Yet here it is, another landmark racing past the windshield of this bull-market dragster. Should you care if the typical stock now yields a paltry 1 point something? After all, it's not as though your baby sitter were paging you at the opera. But yes, you should. For a lot of reasons, this is worrisome...
...that scare you, though. Much has changed, which is why the yield sank to last week's low of 1.99% without disrupting the bull market. Today companies hold back more of what they earn, opting not to increase dividends but to reinvest in operations or buy stock on the open market. This year, for example, blue-chip companies will report record high earnings but pay out a record low portion of those earnings as dividends (37%, vs. a post-World War II average of 52%).That's O.K., so long as reinvesting and buying back shares have their intended effect...
...problem too because these crimes are fast becoming the most egregious on Wall Street. The hot stock market is attracting con artists like ants to a picnic. In the bull market of the 1980s, big-shot investment bankers swapped secret merger information for suitcases stuffed with cash. Giuliani sent a couple of bankers to jail in his day. But many others walked. The result? Stocks still routinely shoot higher ahead of big merger news--a sure sign that the insider-trading problem is anything but licked...