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To: Enigma who wrote (22149)	10/22/1998 5:23:00 PM
From: Pete Mimmack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116789

E - I only get that if I haven't let the main GPM page finish painting the first time (and it's not just GPM where I get it). Performance at SI has been slow the past couple weeks, so natch' I don't always let the ads at the bottom get painted on. But then it requires the repaint every time, so I figure it's worth waiting the first time. Hope this helps. Pete

To: Enigma who wrote (22149)	10/23/1998 6:33:00 AM
From: Alex	Respond to of 116789

WE HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW HOW DEEP THE CRISIS IS By JOHN CRUDELE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CORPORATE profits stink. In fact they stink so badly in the third quarter that Wall Street analysts are disappointed even though companies have been getting them ready for bad news for months. That's the trap for small investors right now. That, and the fact that in a few weeks the markets will be confronted again with the very real possibility that Bill Clinton - accused of more bad things - will be on his way out of office in a historical, torturous, market-shaking process. This is why it is imperative for Washington to finally come clean about what it has been doing in the financial markets. And to level with the American people about the depth of the world financial crisis and the effect it is having on our own financial institutions. If the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have been intervening in the stock market because it is the last defense against economic crisis - - as I very much suspect - then investors need to know what they are getting into. More on that in a moment. But unless Washington starts spilling the beans, it will be responsible for every nickel that Americans lose on Wall Street. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan years ago decried the irrational exuberance of small investors; now - at the worst possible time - he is responsible for reinflating the stock market bubble by refueling that insanity. Here's what we do know for sure. The Federal Reserve has felt compelled to reduce interest rates twice in the past two months - the last cut coming as unexpectedly as any during this decade. There have been vague rumblings of a credit crunch and justified fears that corporate profit growth is falling hard, mainly because of the slowdown in other economies around the world. The Asia-doesn't-matter crowd, which managed to help Wall Street get irrationally exuberant in the first place, has finally been vanquished. But it's been replaced by the Fed-will-ride-to-the-rescue gang, which usually means Wall Street is in a desperate goal-line stance. The Fed and Robert Rubin's Treasury haven't leveled with the public about the extent of financial firms' trading losses. The hedge fund Long Term Capital Management made the headlines only because it was too noisy a failure to hush up. But until Bankers Trust reported a massive loss for the third quarter yesterday, we didn't fully realize how badly the banking sector has been doing. And even after all the numbers are reported for banks, brokerage firms, college-endowment funds, hedge funds and anyone else who's been gambling on exotic financial products in multiple currencies, we still won't know the extent of as-yet unrealized losses. The United States has regularly chewed out Japan for lack of candor about its financial problems. And for allowing financial markets to trade on bad information and people to believe they were investing in a sound financial system when, clearly, they were not. But that's exactly what Washington has been doing by putting together secret bail-outs of hedge funds and helping to conceal the true nature of the banking system's problems. It was also Japan-like in not fully explaining why an emergency interest-rate cut was needed last week. President Clinton has called the world economy the worst in five decades. Privately, top Administration officials have told top people on Wall Street that they agree and that major dangers lie ahead. Trouble is, nobody has told the investing public that they are being used to bail out our financial system. And these historic problems can't be fixed by simply cutting borrowing costs. The recent surge in the stock market, for instance, was a calculated effort on the part of Washington to raise profits for some of the Wall Street firms in trouble. If the maneuver works, fine. Everyone will make money. If the ploy doesn't work, Wall Street will be temporarily helped. But the losses for small investors will be forever. Worse, the integrity of our financial system will be ruined, and public trust in our capital markets destroyed. The 500 companies that make up the Standard & Poor's index are beating analyst expectations of their earnings by a minuscule 0.7 percent, according to IBES, which keeps track of corporate earnings. Ordinarily companies try to make analysts as pessimistic as possible as a way to please them with the actual results. So Wall Street usually underestimates profits by about 2.5 percent. Earnings are coming in weaker than expected, said Joe Abbott, IBES' equity strategist. And analysts had already been anticipating a 5.2 percent drop in third-quarter profits. Back in June, they had expected an 8 percent rise in profits. Into this horrible news, the stock market has rallied almost 1,200 points in the past two weeks. And the rally has mainly been based on the hope that the Fed's credit easing will get the economy rolling again. The old saying on Wall Street is don't fight the Fed. And while this might work again, it could also be that this worst financial crisis in 50 years won't react to the usual tonic because the problem is foreign-borne. Japan's stock market didn't react to rates much lower than ours. Nor did its economy. nypostonline.com