Word: telecoms
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...bonds can be an attractive option for picking up some income. The worst news on bankruptcies and defaults is already factored into junk-bond yields of 11% or more on many funds, which are the best way to invest here. But stay away from those laden with still troubled telecom bonds. Two quality junk-bond funds are Northeast Investors Trust and Pimco High Yield...
Jackson was won over: yet another of Ebbers' conquests. Ebbers' entrepreneurial vision, friends insist, involved not only stringing together scores of lucrative telecom companies--amassing what is today the nation's second largest long-distance firm--but also helping bridge the racial and economic divides that continue to plague Mississippi. A transplanted Canadian, Ebbers, 60, teaches Sunday school at his Baptist church each week, serves meals to the homeless at Frank's Famous Biscuits in downtown Jackson, Miss., lives modestly in a prefab home, wears jeans and boots to the office and has poured almost all his once considerable fortune...
WorldCom, like much of the U.S. telecom industry, looks as broken as a coin phone in a bus station. And so, sadly, does the executive image of Ebbers, who was once the refreshing antithesis of New Economy slick. "I am not a technology dude," he has boasted. But he has slipped nonetheless onto the crowded pyre of '90s corporate excess. "I feel like crying," Ebbers told a Jackson TV station after his resignation last week. "But I am 1,000% convinced in my heart that this is a temporary thing...
...counted many of America's largest corporations as customers for its vast voice and data network and, after buying IDB, grandly renamed itself WorldCom. It then acquired UUNET, one of the world's largest Internet hookup firms, along with AOL's Internet networking division. Ebbers then brashly outbid British Telecom to grab MCI, using as currency his WorldCom stock, whose value skyrocketed 7,000% during the 1990s...
...when the New Economy, and telecom demand, turned south in 2000, Ebbers' company was caught heavily in debt for a grab bag of telecom companies, many of which were operating pretty much separately and without the efficiencies he had promised. One reason: for all his aw-shucks manner, Ebbers had come to prefer the glamour of dealmaking to the quotidian work of integrating and running a complex business. "At one time we had more than 40 different billing systems," grouses a former high-level WorldCom executive. Ebbers' solution? Keep buying. His latest target was Sprint, but U.S. and European regulators...