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To: Wall Street Jr who wrote (2577)	9/27/1999 10:46:00 AM
From: Ram Seetharaman	Respond to of 2920

TheStreet.com Market May Be Ready for a Rebound By Thomas Lepri Staff Reporter 9/27/99 8:33 AM ET Stocks are poised to move higher in the early going today. At 8:05 a.m. EDT, the S&P 500 futures were up 8.2, about 6 points above fair value and indicating a positive open. The 30-year Treasury was up 5/32 to 101 31/32, putting the yield at 5.982%. Whether that early rally will sustain itself or prove a mere short-term, tech-led bounce is anyone's guess. No major economic data are on the slate today to guide the market. But stocks do have a weekend's worth of commentary from which they may draw some support. For starters, Goldman Sachs strategist Abby Joseph Cohen served up another frothing iteration of her usual bullish take on the market over the weekend. At a conference sponsored by the Institute for International Finance, Cohen described stocks as "modestly undervalued," repeating her S&P 500 price targets of 1385 by year-end and 1450 by the summer of 2000. Cohen bases those forecasts on continuing low inflation and an "imminently achievable" 8% growth rate in corporate profits through the end of 2000. Meanwhile, William McDonough, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told reporters in Washington that despite heightened risk-taking in the financial sector, "the banking system is functioning just about where I would like it to be -- that is, [there is] an appropriate willingness to take risk but with good, sensible judgments in general being demonstrated." That may help alleviate some of the recent pressure on the financial sector, which has suffered amid talk about declining commercial loan quality. But the weekend's economic spotlight was focused on the G7's meeting in Washington. On Saturday, in a less than market-roiling but still somewhat stronger-than-expected statement, the G7 nations gave the dollar some much-needed support against the yen when they jointly expressed their "concern" over the yen's recent strength. More intriguing was a statement by Bank of Japan Governor Masuru Hayami that some have construed to mean that the BOJ is ready to expand Japan's money supply, something it flat-out refused to do at its meeting last week. Hayami obscurely said that the BOJ is "exploring how we could improve money-market operations so as to assure the further permeation of liquidity in the context of a zero interest-rate policy." Tokyo traders took the dollar as high as 105.91 yen in expectation of a possible BOJ policy easing. But the dollar dipped back below the 104 yen level after the central bank left its usual 1 trillion-yen surplus in the money market. The dollar had lately regained its earlier strength, quoted at 105.33 yen. Japanese stocks followed the yen's fortunes overnight, rising early but ultimately receding. The benchmark Nikkei shed 50.67 to 16,821.06. In Hong Kong, stocks were already trading lower when a television station reported that the government is preparing to sell some of the Hang Seng-based portfolio of stocks it acquired when it intervened in the stock and futures markets last year. Though the news wasn't entirely unexpected, it set off some heavy futures selling, which in turn weighed on the cash market. The Hang Seng shed 271.61, or 2.1%, to 12,760.46. The big European indices were all trending higher at midsession. London's FTSE was up 99.2, or 1.7%, to 6036.8, while the Paris CAC was 34.19 higher to 4575.06. Frankfurt's Xetra Dax was up 34.40 to 5220.93.