Not up in smoke. The pension funds were stolen.
Free lance journalist Pierre Belec seems to have some really good no-BS high tech and pension fund economic articles.
Csd wanted to find other articles written by Belec, so csd entered in google pierre belec December
Oh dear. Number 1
csd homepage Saturday December 7, 2002 20:19. ... Believe All the Hype About B2B, It's the Real Thing By Pierre Belec Reuters NEW YORK (March 3) - The New Economy is changing at ... www.geocities.com/computersystemsdocumentation/ - 101k - Dec. 8, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages
Google knows all, we think. Also google catches all. Like Bush1, Turner, and Inman. And Morales and Payne!
Even not digitizing at a sensor and psychotic fits at the keyboard!
We're following high tech fraud.
Ticking Sound May Be Your Pension Fund.
By Pierre Belec.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -
Wall Street is waiting for the next shoe to drop. The ...Corporate underfunding, as it's called, is a ticking time bomb that will cast more doubt on the profitability of the nation's largest companies and the market's rebound.
"In the years ahead, earnings are likely to be depleted by pension liabilities," says John Hussman, publisher of Hussman Econometrics and professor of economics at the University of Michigan.
"Many companies continue to make assumptions about the probable return on stocks that has no relationship with the rate of return that stocks are actually priced to deliver," he says.
Investors should wise up to the implications of companies clinging to expectations the stock market will deliver double-digit gains because what's left of their battered 401(k) retirement money is at risk, Hussman says.
The pension fund issue is creating a newer and perhaps a bigger problem for the stock market. Many investors are staying on the sidelines, preferring to focus on the market's probable sub-par return. And they're ignoring the bizarre assumption of companies like GM, which are not operating in the real world, with expectations that their pension investments will grow by 10 percent.
Bill has been in high tech long enough so that he has a keen nose for high tech fraud.
Also bill has been into academics so he also has a keen nose for academic BS and BSers.
Bill once wrote an article for ACM on the Ph.D. glut [fud glut].
Bill is keenly aware of counterfeit PhDs and PhD counterfeiters. But later for this.
Mushashi again!
Know the ways of all professions
and
Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything
Especially fraud artists and lawyers. In both high tech and academia.
Bill got an email from his MS and Ph.D. student lewis on Sunday
Today's San Jose Mercury has a list of people who made millions off the doc.com bubble.
Seems someone got took. Guess who?--ted
Ted Lewis, Ph.D.
[email protected]
Ted, of course, is an investor!
Since some are reading this stuff, I'll tell you a funny story.
Lewis at his Ph.D. oral preliminary examination had a tough time.
There is only one question he really did well at.
Lewis was asked to explain, in detail, quick sorting.
He did great on that question.
Reason is, of course, that bill told Lewis to know all about quick sorting before the exam!
Purdue mathmetician Edward Silverman taught bill this ploy to get students through oral exams.
When bill went out of the exam room to tell Lewis he passed.
No Lewis.
Bill had to drive to Lewis's appartment to tell him he passed.
Lewis was so convinced he failed he simply went home!
More on students.
John Sobolewski is also one of bill's Ph.D. students.
Before Sobolewski's preliminary Ph.D. exam, bill suggested to Sobolewski that he study a/d converter methods.
Sobolewski did great on a/d converter methods and also well on other questions too.
Patty and bill went to the Sobolewski's for dinner this thanksgiving.
Sobolewski's live about 2 miles from us.
Isn't a thesis advisor's duty to help and guide his
students?
Debt monster
To be sure, the threat of a Sears bankruptcy is by no means imminent. Even today Sears remains a huge business, with $40 billion in annual sales, a payroll of 310,000 employees, and balance sheet equity of more than $6.2 billion.
Let's watch ARM, MIPS, ARC, Tensillica, and other microcontroller companies this year.
While we perfect products for 80C32 SOCS, of course!
Sampling of 40 biggest losers is only tip of insider iceberg ...
To make the cut, a company's stock had to lose at least 99.5 percent of its value between March 2000 and September 2002.
Overall, there were 319 publicly traded companies in the valley during that period.
Had the cutoff been set at a stock decline of 90 percent, the number of companies would leap to 146. In fact, half the publicly traded companies in the valley have lost at least 87 percent of their stock value since the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000.
The Mercury News examined the stock sales record of insiders at 40 companies in Silicon Valley that have lost virtually all their value since the stock market peaked in March 2000. The executives, board members and venture capitalists at these companies walked off with $3.41 billion, while their companies' total market value plunged 99.8 percent to a mere $229.5 million at the end of September.
``This is not a victimless crime,'' said Charlie Cray, director of Citizen Works' Campaign for Corporate Reform. ``The argument is that they're taking risks. But they're taking risks with other people's money.
Portal's stock peaked at $83.94 on Feb. 24, 2000. The stock then began a steady slide to $6.75 on Nov. 22, 2000, when Portal reported disappointing quarterly results. A Goldman analyst downgraded Portal for the first time that day from his recommended list to ``market outperform'' -- still the equivalent of a buy rating.
But while Goldman continued to tell investors to buy, insiders at Portal were selling. By the time of the downgrade, Portal had been public only 18 months and insiders had already sold more than $695 million in stock.
Since then, Portal's revenues have plummeted, from a high of $81 million in the final quarter of 2000 to $30.2 million in the most recent quarter. The company has restructured three times and fired 870 employees on its way to reducing its workforce to 600 by the end of this year.
And five lawsuits have been filed against the company alleging securities fraud for the way its IPO was conducted.
Portal is in danger of being delisted from Nasdaq because its stock price has been at around $1 a share for so long. Once worth more than $1 billion, the more than 35.1 million shares of Portal currently owned by CEO Little are now worth $38.6 million.
A lot of us are going to try to make it though 2003, without bankruptcy, to emerge in 2004 with products. But we can't incur too much debit.
Sunday December 8, 2002 19:53
Senior citizen trouble!?
TO BE PRECISE: in 2000, there were 61 million Americans 45 to 64; by 2010, there will be 79 million, estimates the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The increase is 30 percent, even though the entire over-16 population is projected to grow just 11 percent. Roughly one in three working-age Americans will soon be “mature.” We baby boomers are advancing toward old age.
The trouble is that society doesn’t quite know what to do with us. For years, the trend has been toward ever earlier retirement. People wanted (it was said) rest and recreation. Companies needed to make room for the young and ambitious (that was us). Retirement emerged as everyone’s entitlement—life’s earned vacation. In 1960, 78 percent of men from 60 to 64 were in the labor force, as were 31 percent of those 65 and over. By 2000, those figures were 55 and 18 percent, respectively.
Early retirement’s lure remains. It’s dangerous to generalize about any group as massive as everyone 45 to 65. But some things can be safely said: most of us have fewer illusions than at, say, 25; we have usually substituted attainable ambitions for unrealistic fantasies. For many, early retirement is still the thing. Plenty of us have huge enthusiasm for work. But others have had enough. They want out.
Some are also being pushed out. Older workers span the spectrum of human potential—from deadwood to spark plugs. But many are expensive workers. They’ve received years of cost-of-living and merit wage increases. Their health expenses are rising. When companies want to cut costs—as they do now—the temptation to substitute younger (and cheaper) workers for older (and more expensive) workers is powerful. “Early retirement” programs multiply. Experience is expendable.
Equivalent to doing the wrong thing in business
EYEWITNESS TO CUSTER'S LAST STAND
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and 225 of his men died in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Custer's final battle made him a legend and stirred up considerable controversy.
Sure is going to be an interesting 2003.
But, of course, csd is thinking simple this year. About settlement.
And 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, too.
The sale deserves attention for a couple of reasons. First, it comes amid one of the weakest IPO markets on memory. Technology IPOs have only raised $265 million all year -- a fraction of the $10 billion generated in 2001 or the $30 billion from 2000. ...
In the year ended in June, Seagate had net income of $153 million on $6.1 billion of revenue, according to its prospectus. That compares with $214 million of net income on revenue of $6.2 billion during the comparable 2000 period that came largely before the buyout.
However, last year's bottom line was a dramatic improvement from the more than $500 million that Seagate lost in the year ended July 2001.
The disk-drive space is still fiercely competitive, and the company is directly linked to a still-weak computer industry, analysts said.
Want to gamble some of your remaining 401k money?
In late 1873, the first Great Economic Depression in US history began. The entire banking system of the nation collapsed, having overextended loans.
People could not get what little savings they had in their bank accounts, and many banks closed forever. ...
The pension fund 401k money did not evaporate. It was stolen using high tech.
Executives at Silicon Valley companies that lost most of their value during the dot-com bust made billions of dollars when they sold their stock, according to an analysis by the San Jose Mercury News.
The newspaper examined records of stock sales by executives, board members and venture capitalists at 40 companies that have become almost worthless since March 2000. It found that the insiders walked away with $3.41 billion from the sales while, by Sept. 30, their companies' total market value fell 99.8 percent to $229.5 million. "This money was taken from investors who didn't have the same information as these insiders and lost their money," said Charles Elson, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
Most of the companies are software, hardware and telecommunications firms. The newspaper only included companies whose stock price dropped at least 99.5 percent. Most had major restructurings that included layoffs and 15 declared bankruptcy. ...
Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, which studies corporations, is a critic of allowing insiders to sell stock.
"They sell the stock and then they restate the earnings," Minow said. "That brings it one step closer to being a Ponzi scheme."
Belec is telling us, of course, that NASDAQ stocks are not going to return to their bubble highs. Or even maintain their current highs.
But where is the bottom? And how do we guess when to starting buying again. PE = 4? Or 10?
It's a nice book for investors who are serious about scouring the market for good stocks, because it spells out the exact criteria by which the Warren Buffetts, Martin Zweigs and Peter Lynches of the world came by their fortunes. It's as if each star investor wrote a chapter opening his own magic box of strategies. And every detail is summarized in a grand final chapter called "the famous ratios" which lists and explains the numbers that can point the way to good stocks.
For example, there's not one of the famous investors who doesn't look at some measure of a company's intrinsic value. Most looked at the ratio of a company's share price to its earnings, either as a stand-alone statistic or in relation to other figures. For example, Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, liked companies with PE ratios under 15. Peter Lynch only looked at the PE of those firms with sales exceeding $1 billion, and he wanted them to have PEs under 40.
That gives you a much longer list of companies, but not the whole universe.
Even William O'Neil, the publisher of Investor's Business Daily who is famous for loving fast growing companies and stocks that are moving up quickly, likes to look at PE and compare it to how fast a company's earnings are growing. In his estimation, a high price/earnings ratio is okay if it is exceeded by the company's annual earnings growth rate.
That ratio is called PEG.
What about Warren Buffett, probably the most lauded investor still trading today? He doesn't look at PE, or O'Neil's PEG, or price-to-sales or yield, other measures you'd expect a traditional value investor to use. Instead, Buffett really scours a company's debts, and buys shares only in firms that can pay off their long-term debt with two years of net earnings... last year's earnings. His ratio? Long-term debt must be less than twice last year's earnings.
In fact, all but one of the famous investors steered clear of companies with high debt loads, though each had his own way of measuring that.
Then there is the debt problem which we wish to avoid by not buying the expensive and antiquated Keil cross non-operating system 80C32 software development system.
"This economy is really laboring under a tremendous debt load," said Paul Kasriel, director of economic research at Northern Trust in Chicago. "The corporate sector has made great strides in slowing down its borrowing, but the private sector hasn't even started."
Sure enough, debt as a percentage of assets among households has reached new highs, consumer borrowing was very strong in the third quarter and equity extraction from homes has been enormous. ...
As a result, Mr. Hatzius and Mr. Kasriel both expect the economy to sputter along next year. Mr. Hatzius projects gross domestic product growth of around 2 percent for 2003, while Mr. Kasriel forecasts around 3 percent.
So where does that leave the stock market? Stable, perhaps, but not strapping.
"Sluggish gross domestic product growth usually means corporate profits aren't much better than flat," Mr. Hatzius said. And if corporate profits stagnate, stock indexes may, too. What has gone on in the past two years may well continue: individual stocks do well but the indexes disappoint.
"This economy is in hock," Mr. Kasriel said. "It has come off 20 years of extreme leveraging. It's going to take time to work through these things. And it won't be pleasant."