Federal laws against kickbacks bar pharmaceutical companies from directly giving money to patients for co-payments on the drugs they make.
— Alex Berenson
Evidence of defendants' lavish lifestyles is often used to provide a motive for fraud. Jurors sometimes wonder why an executive making tens of millions of dollars would cheat to make even more. Evidence of habitual gluttony helps provide the answer.
In general, investors prefer companies to reward executives for producing recurring income, not one-time gains.
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.
Mr. Hussein began building Ghazalia in the early 1980s as a home for army officers and other members of his Baath Party. Concrete mansions with pillars and domes are common in the southern half of the district.
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.
Corporate executives often buy or sell shares in their companies, and stocks rarely rise or fall significantly when those transactions are reported.
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.
Stocks in the United States plunged in 2002 amid fears of war and terrorism, a weak economy, rising oil prices and dozens of corporate scandals. It was the third consecutive annual decline, the first time that has happened in 60 years.
Predicting the market is always tough.
Most unfortunately, Enron's plunge into bankruptcy court also cost many of its rank-and-file employees their savings.
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.
Trust-me companies are companies whose financial results gallop ahead of their businesses, companies with seemingly perfect control over their quarterly sales and profits. Companies whose financial statements are loaded with footnotes: companies that short-sellers often attack but rarely dent.
Most companies can survive even if their debt ratings are lowered below investment grade, although they will have higher borrowing costs.
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.
Trust the Canadians to produce a game about mutual funds that is actually more boring than the real thing.
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.
HealthWell is just one of several foundations that assist patients in making their insurance co-payments for expensive drugs.
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.
Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.
Wal-Mart does not do big mergers, though it will buy much smaller competitors in so-called 'tuck-in acquisitions.'
In the short run, using militias might be the quickest and easiest way to improve order on Iraq's streets and uproot the terrorists and guerrillas who routinely attack American troops and civilian targets.
Iraq is short on capital, short on electricity, and short on management expertise, but it does not lack economic enthusiasm.
Insider trading is hard to prove. To be convicted, a person must have bought or sold a stock based on material information that is both unknown to the general public and likely to have had an important effect on a company's stock price.
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.
John W. Snow was paid more than $50 million in salary, bonus and stock in his nearly 12 years as chairman of the CSX Corporation, the railroad company. During that period, the company's profits fell, and its stock rose a bit more than half as much as that of the average big company.
As a public servant, William H. Webster has an impeccable resume.
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.
Some companies use off-balance-sheet partnerships to raise money or to buy assets without ever telling their shareholders in their financial statements.
Investors have been too willing to buy stocks with strong reported earnings, even if they do not understand how the earnings are produced.
Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.
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.
The thing to do with mutual funds is to buy a couple of decent ones, set up an investment plan and then never, ever think about them again, except maybe once a quarter or so when you take a peek at your statements to make sure that you have not accidentally been buying the Fidelity Peace-in-the-Middle-East fund.
Bigger spreads mean bigger gaps between what buyers pay and sellers receive. For example, a spread of 10 cents a share means that the buyer pays $100 more for 1,000 shares than the seller receives.
Even a war zone looks peaceful in most places, most of the time.
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.
Companies buy customers when they cannot win new business on their own. They merge when their executives do not have a better idea of what to do.
In Ghazalia, Mr. Hussein showed his contempt for the majority Shiites in ways large and small. He refused to allow them even one mosque, while the Sunnis had nearly a dozen. To worship, the Shiites had to cross an inconveniently located bridge over the sewage canal to Shula.
For a developing country, average long-run growth of 5 percent a year per capita is excellent, and 7 percent is stellar.
Although not well known outside Wall Street, Freddie Mac and its corporate cousin, Fannie Mae, are two of the world's largest financial institutions and play a crucial role in the housing market.
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.
At the end of 2000, most investors were optimistic that a return to quick gains could not be far off.
An attack on the scale of Sept. 11 would rock the markets and the economy.
Determining how many asbestos suits have been filed or how much companies have spent to resolve them is difficult. Cases are filed in state and federal courts, and many companies do not disclose their spending on settlements.
The credit quality of junk bonds varies widely.
Every public company depends to some extent on the trust of its investors.
Publicly traded United States companies report sales and profits to investors every quarter.
Trailer home borrowers, mostly near the bottom of the economic ladder, often default on their loans.
Even technology companies get good news sometimes.
I know it's a cliche, but trust me on this. I once dated a Canadian. Canada = boring.
