Word: stockings
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...long run, that collaborativeness bolsters the firm's ability to do what it thinks is best for investors. Consider the 1990s, when tech-stock valuations soared off the charts. Many value investors came under enormous pressure from shareholders and corporate parents to load up on ridiculously inflated stocks. David Hoeft, who covers technology stocks at Dodge & Cox and sits on the domestic-equities committee, recalls a very different experience. "Our job inside the firm got easier," he says. "We trimmed as time went on. We just couldn't rationalize the expectations." No finger pointing. No pressure from the boss...
...signal is working its way up the vertebrae," says Jeremy Grantham, chairman of Boston money manager GMO. But even the bearish Grantham doesn't see the reckoning coming tomorrow or even necessarily next year. And in the meantime, something with far more impact on most Americans' lives than a stock-market correction has already happened...
That something is the close of a remarkable era of easy money. Cheap credit helped fuel the stock bubble at the end of the past millennium and almost entirely fueled the real estate boom of the first years of this millennium. It kept us spending through the tough years that followed the stock market's collapse, and it allowed the Bush Administration to finance big budget deficits without strain. Easy money also helped enable the rise of private equity as a major economic force...
After the stock-market crash of 2001 and 2002, the Fed worried that inflation was so low it might turn into deflation. So it cut short-term rates even further, reducing them to 1% in 2003, while the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond--a key benchmark of long-term rates--dropped as low as 3.13%. The result: a real estate boom, as ultra-low mortgage rates made houses affordable at ever higher prices. Cash from refinancings and home-equity loans also kept consumer spending strong. By mid-2004, confident that deflation was out of the picture...
...people can play with new identities and get off on the frisson of being somebody else. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has argued that this kind of identity-play even has therapeutic value. You certainly can't ascribe a plausible financial motive to Mackey--rahodeb's postings weren't moving stock prices around. This was about just being naughty: picture Mackey chortling as he played the regular rube, like Marie Antoinette dressing up as a peasant and milking cows on the fake farm she built near Versailles. (Mackey was even in drag, sort of--rahodeb is an anagram of his wife...