About Alex Berenson: Alex Berenson is a former reporter for The New York Times and the author of several thriller novels and a book on corporate financial filings.
At first glance, Martha Stewart, queen of artfully distressed home furnishings, might not seem to have much in common with Michael R. Milken, one-time king of junk bonds.
Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.
In general, great companies prefer to grow 'organically,' as Wall Street likes to say. That is, from the inside out, by finding new markets or by taking market share from their competitors.
The world is filled with great sporting events.
Most of America never noticed, but the 1990s were good times for trailer homes, a.k.a. manufactured housing. From 1991 to 1998, annual sales of manufactured homes more than doubled, to 374,000 from 174,000.
Good spectator sports share certain fundamentals. Their competitors battle head-to-head. Their winners are determined objectively: fastest runner, most points. They are refereed, not judged.
Lower interest rates are usually considered good for stocks because they lower the cost of borrowing and make bonds a less attractive alternative investment.
Even technology companies get good news sometimes.
Macroeconomics is the analysis of the economy as a whole, an examination of overall supply and demand. At the broadest level, macroeconomists want to understand why some countries grow faster than others and which government policies can help growth.
Fannie Mae is owned by shareholders but operates under a federal charter that exempts it from paying state or local taxes. As a result, many professional investors think the government would repay the debt that Fannie Mae had issued if the company co...
Like many other banks and finance companies, Green Tree used a process called securitization to resell its home loans to outside investors. Green Tree grouped thousands of these small loans into a pool worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
To finance deficits, the government must sell bonds to investors, competing for capital that could otherwise be used to invest in stocks or corporate bonds. Government borrowings raise long-term interest rates, stifling economic growth.
Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.
African runners regularly work out in the United States and Europe, and the International Olympic Committee sends some of the cash from the Games to Olympic committees in poor nations, which use the money to finance their own programs.
Because Genentech is a leading developer of cancer therapies, some doctors also fear that the company's pricing plans for Avastin - around $8,800 a month - may encourage other companies to charge more for their own oncology drugs.
Of course, the discounting of future earnings should hurt all stocks. But it should hurt technology stocks more than others, because so many of them are valued at extremely high levels relative to their current earnings.
From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.
Many legal experts note that prosecutors regularly seek indictments of people or companies for destroying evidence or impeding investigations, even if they cannot prove other charges.
Trust the Canadians to produce a game about mutual funds that is actually more boring than the real thing.
Every public company depends to some extent on the trust of its investors.
I know it's a cliche, but trust me on this. I once dated a Canadian. Canada = boring.
