Word: junks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...State of Maryland sued a seller of medical-alert units (price: $1,295 each) that became useless junk when the firm failed to pay the company monitoring the equipment. And the American Association of Retired Persons decries the industry's high-pressure sales ploys. According to Myra Herrick, a retired Boston AARP representative, one elderly woman bought a Lifecall system after a four-hour sales pitch because she wanted the salesperson to leave. (Lifecall denies knowledge of the incident.) AARP contends that at $1,000 or more plus monthly monitoring fees, the systems are usually costlier than emergency-response services...
...Cuban sugar. Moscow still delivers military and industrial equipment free, but no one is quite sure what it is worth. Western intelligence agencies price it at about $1 billion a year, but as Cuba's Deputy Foreign Minister, Jose Raul Viera, once described it, the equipment is "junk no one buys...
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...