Word: scenario
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Money managers call it the doomsday scenario, forseeing an event that could wipe out investor portfolios and wreak havoc on the stock market. The danger stems not from new financial woes erupting abroad but from something happening here. It is the explosive growth in margin debt--loans Americans take out to buy stocks. Margin debt has shot up to $180 billion at midyear, a 25% increase in just six months and by far the most ever recorded. It now accounts for 1.2% of the stock market's total capitalization...
...could margin investing turn cataclysmic? Here's the scenario most feared--and most plausible. The combination of rising interest rates, lofty P/E ratios and some unexpected Y2K problems in the period ahead could jolt the market into a major sell-off. Internet stocks would be most vulnerable, but the damage could spread to other equities as well. If a stock bought on margin falls 30%, the stockbroker typically grabs the phone and utters the dread words "margin call." It means you've lost so much money on the stock you bought with borrowed funds that you have to dig into...
...Kremlin's not playing chess," says Alexander Oslon, Russia's leading pollster. "They're playing checkers--they're living one day at a time." With the end of Yeltsin's second term 10 months away, the Family is beset by fear of humiliation, if not prosecution. ("The Ceausescu scenario," a Kremlin staff member calls it, recalling the collapse of Romania's dictatorship in 1989.) Ironically, the gravest threat may be neither Luzhkov nor the Chechen rebels but a corps of Swiss prosecutors that has been probing allegations of financial malfeasance in the Kremlin, centering on lucrative contracts awarded a Swiss...
...measured the differences between human and chimpanzee DNA, then averaged the rate of genetic change over time. By calculating backward, they determined that great apes and hominids branched from a common ancestor between 6 million and 4 million years ago. But no fossils were on hand to support this scenario. The oldest hominid species known, Australopithecus afarensis (southern ape of the Afar), could be dated back only 3.6 million years. Its most famous member, Lucy, unearthed in Ethiopia's bleak Afar Triangle in 1974, is a mere 3.2 million years...
...Snoopy's company just yet, though; That $1.7 billion isn't all going to its customers. Although lawyers' fees could top $100 million, the company hopes to pay most of those 7 million customers in additional coverage rather than in cash. In such a scenario, the payout is based on what it would cost consumers to buy that additional coverage, not what it is costing the company to provide it. And execs have already bought settlement insurance to take care of that amount. Most important, the deal gives Met Life a clean slate as it heads into...