The NASDAQ index was down 72 percent from its March 2000 high at Friday’s close. Conversely, the Dow Jones Industrial Index was down only 21 percent from its high of January 2000,while the Russell 2000 Index, of smaller capitalization stocks was down 29 percent. What’s happening, why, and what does it portend?

The Arthur Andersen verdict is the first major act of retribution for the excesses of the 90s; one of the “Big 5” accounting firms appears to have been forced out of business. It, of course, raises the question: If the guillotine is to be applied to the perpetrators of the ’90s bubble, then whose heads […]

I thought it worth asking, in the adapted words of the old fairy tale, “Mirror, mirror on the wall; Where is the Blackest Bear of all?” after a week in which bearish news for the world’s economies has been around in considerable profusion.

“Greed is Good,” chortled Gordon Gekko, villain/hero of Oliver Stone’s 1987 morality play “Wall Street” — and thereby defined the 1980s the “Decade of Greed.” Yet on seeing the movie again, one is struck by how close Gekko’s credo is to the way capitalism should work, and how far it is from the reality of […]