In market valuation, Yahoo is worth about as much Walt Disney and the News Corporation combined.
Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.
The notion that employees and companies have a social contract with each other that goes beyond a paycheck has largely vanished in United States business.
Soldiers willingly, sometimes foolishly, risk their own lives to keep their comrades out of enemy hands.
Generally, a rally will have staying power, technicians say, if, in addition to price movements, it has heavy trading volume and breadth, meaning that several stocks rise for each stock that falls.
Downhill track sports like luge are technology battles, as exciting as a NASCAR qualifying day.
Would-be drug companies must either produce medicines that stand up to federal scrutiny, demonstrate that their data has value to other companies, or go out of business.
Don't expect Barton Biggs to be offering his market insights on 'Bloomberg News' anytime soon. His plumber, maybe.
When all the plants in a region are running at full steam, there is simply no way to get more power.
The stock prices of networking equipment companies like Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks sometimes seem as if they are priced for perpetual success.
Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.
Before Jason Bourne, before Jack Ryan, there was Bond, James Bond, the original two-dimensional, world-saving secret agent.
Investors have been too willing to buy stocks with strong reported earnings, even if they do not understand how the earnings are produced.
Microeconomics is the study of how specific choices made by businesses, consumers and governments affect the markets for different goods and services. For example, a microeconomist might examine how price changes affect sales of apples relative to oranges.
In general, investors prefer companies to reward executives for producing recurring income, not one-time gains.
Trailer home borrowers, mostly near the bottom of the economic ladder, often default on their loans.
America Online, of course, is a master of the hard sell, from stuffing mailboxes with free trial offers to forcing subscribers to click through ads before they can get their e-mail.
For investors who do want to speculate in high-yield bonds, one alternative may be a junk bond mutual fund, which can offer investors the relative safety of diversification.
It's one of the fundamental principles of the stock market: When interest rates go up, stocks go down. And along with financial companies and cyclicals, technology companies - with their sky-high price-to-earnings multiples - should be among the biggest losers in an environment of rising rates.
Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.
Fannie Mae has never publicly disclosed how much money it could lose if interest rates rose 1.5 percentage points in a very short period of time.
Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.
Most companies can survive even if their debt ratings are lowered below investment grade, although they will have higher borrowing costs.
Some big banks remain wary of venture capital.
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.
Mr. Snowden did not start out as a spy, and calling him one bends the term past recognition. Spies don't give their secrets to journalists for free.
Iraq is short on capital, short on electricity, and short on management expertise, but it does not lack economic enthusiasm.
Federal laws against kickbacks bar pharmaceutical companies from directly giving money to patients for co-payments on the drugs they make.
Enron Field in Houston, the Trans World Dome in St. Louis and PSINet Stadium in Baltimore are just three of the modern-day coliseums named for companies that have found new homes in bankruptcy court.
After a generation of misrule under Mr. Hussein, who built a huge military infrastructure while neglecting civilian investment, and a dozen years of United Nations sanctions, Iraq's unemployment rate tops 50 percent.
Also, most people read fiction as an escape - and I wonder whether my books aren't a bit too grounded in reality to reach the widest possible audience.
Individual income can grow only as fast as productivity rises.
The lower spreads mean lower costs for investors, because Nasdaq investors generally do not trade directly with one another. Instead, they usually buy and sell from market-makers, brokerage firms that flip shares between buyers and sellers and keep the spread for themselves.
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.
Never underestimate the power of Abby Joseph Cohen.
Studies show that Avastin can prolong the lives of patients with late-stage breast and lung cancer by several months when the drug is combined with existing therapies.
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.
Volatility may be rising simply because investors must digest more information every day.
Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology.
The credit quality of junk bonds varies widely.
Publicly traded United States companies report sales and profits to investors every quarter.
Benefits are rarely made public in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, where companies must report the pay and options that their five highest-paid executives receive.
The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.
Climate change might be disastrous, but does that mean we want carbon taxes that raise the price of a gallon of heating oil to $10? And how exactly will those taxes affect economic growth?
The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them.
Rising interest rates are considered bad for stocks because they raise the cost of doing business and depress corporate earnings and because higher yields make bonds relatively more attractive than stocks to investors.
Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.
HealthWell is just one of several foundations that assist patients in making their insurance co-payments for expensive drugs.
Predicting the market is always tough.
