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...will be the first to benefit from an upturn. This Italian insurer could have two added bounces: it's better capitalized than many rivals and its messy ownership structure has just been simplified. LOSERS BAE: You might think defense contractors would thrive during wartime. But Britain's BAE, maker of military jets and submarines and a part-owner of Airbus, is caught in a war of its own. It wants to partner with an American firm, possibly Boeing, but that could conflict with its joint ventures in Europe. TOTALFINAELF: With the majority of Iraqi oil wells secured...
Excerpted in the New Yorker three months before it was published as a book, biologist Rachel Carson's eloquent, rigorous attack on the overuse of DDT and other pesticides--she called them "elixirs of death"--had already upset the chemical industry. Velsicol, maker of two top bug killers, threatened to sue the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which stood firm but asked a toxicologist to recheck Carson's facts before it shipped Silent Spring to bookstores...
...turn of the 21st century gives us plenty of candidates too. The run-up to the millennium was characterized by one of the frothiest stock-market surges of all time, kicked off on Aug. 9, 1995, when the initial public offering (IPO) of stock in the Internet-browser maker Netscape rocketed from an expected initial price of $12 to an opening trade of $71. Hundreds of IPOs later, on March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ index hit the all-time high of 5132.52, from which it would fall 62% in just two years...
...asset value per share almost halved last year as core holdings, including mobile-phone giant Ericsson and ABB, a Swedish-Swiss engineering firm, ran into serious trouble. The Wallenbergs' strategy: to use market weakness to boost their stakes in core holdings, among them bank SEB, Ericsson, ABB and appliance maker Electrolux. The Wallenbergs are making new investments in technology and have fostered a venture-capital arm. Those investments so far are losing money. But the young Wallenbergs hold to the motto used by their grandfather: "To move from the old to what is about to come is the only tradition...
Warren Buffett has been busy buying private companies, including The Pampered Chef, a kitchenware retailer, and apparel maker Garan (of Garanimals fame). That's promising. It suggests a value gap between the private and public markets because Buffett finds most common stocks still overvalued. Meanwhile, private-asset funds are a contrarian's delight: net new investment in venture-capital funds, which mainly seed technology and medical start-ups, plunged to $1.9 billion last year (the least since '81) amid investment losses that roughly tracked the public markets. Yet over three years and longer, these funds have outperformed stocks. "The tourists...