Word: junking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Children are especially vulnerable to the junk that your neighbor's lawn service fogs around or to the "completely safe for humans" stuff that you bought at the hardware store. Lawn poisons can cause headaches, dizziness, eye problems, mental disorientation and lasting damage to the nervous system. Cancer is also a possibility, since some pesticides contain known carcinogens. Of course, your lawn looks great...
...offering higher payouts on annuities and charging lower fees than most of its competitors. To meet its growing obligations, the insurer plunged headlong into the high-yield bond market controlled by Drexel Burnham's Michael Milken and puffed up its $10.1 billion asset base with $6.4 billion in risky junk bonds. Once the junk-bond market fizzled in 1989, First Executive Corp., Executive Life's holding company, began to sustain huge losses. California insurance officials are now investigating other large insurers to determine whether they also are too heavily invested in junk bonds...
During its heyday, Executive Life swam with the sharks. When raider Charles Hurwitz took over San Francisco-based Pacific Lumber in 1986 with the help of $900 million in Drexel junk bonds, for example, First Executive Corporation, bought more than one-third of those bonds. Once in charge, Hurwitz terminated the pension plan and grabbed the $55 million worth of surplus pension funds to pay down part of his buyout debt. He then bought $38 million worth of Executive Life annuities to cover 2,500 people, thus shedding his obligations and saving himself the cost of the premiums...
Similarly, when corporate raider Ronald Perelman seized Revlon in 1985, First Executive helped finance the $2.7 billion takeover, buying $370 million worth of Drexel's junk bonds. Perelman shut down Revlon's pension plan and skimmed off at least $50 million in "excess funding." He then rolled existing pension obligations into Executive Life annuities. Says Eli Schefer, a retired Revlon engineer in Sands Point, N.Y.: "Those were cozy deals, not done according to fiduciary standards. These guys should be thrown in jail. Now that I am almost 72, I've got to worry about when my next pension check...
...Capital annuity holders in 49 states know exactly what he means. Pensioners whose retirement savings are locked in the wreckage must now wait to see what they will be able to recover. Like Executive Life, First Capital invested recklessly in risky high-yield bonds: 46% of its assets are junk...