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Alex Berenson [1973-0] American

Rank: 102
Author, Reporter

Alex Berenson is a former reporter for The New York Times and the author of several thriller novels and a book on corporate financial filings.

Finance, Technology, Chance, Computers, Home, Legal, Money, Time

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.		101
Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.	Money, Technology, Time	102
Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.		103
If only the human body could handle trauma as well as biotechnology stocks do.		104
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.		105
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.	Finance, Home	106
For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge.		107
Sochi started with the same problem as every Winter Olympics. Forget the crass commercialism, the fake amateurism, NBC's refusal to televise important events live to all its viewers. As an event, the Winter Games fail on the most basic level. They're lousy to watch.		108
Of course, the discounting of future earnings should hurt all stocks. But it should hurt technology stocks more than others, because so many of them are valued at extremely high levels relative to their current earnings.	Technology	109
Volatility may be rising simply because investors must digest more information every day.		110
The notion that employees and companies have a social contract with each other that goes beyond a paycheck has largely vanished in United States business.		111
Individual income can grow only as fast as productivity rises.		112
For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company's share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars.		113
Macroeconomics is the analysis of the economy as a whole, an examination of overall supply and demand. At the broadest level, macroeconomists want to understand why some countries grow faster than others and which government policies can help growth.		114
Publicly traded United States companies report sales and profits to investors every quarter.		115
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.		116
Even a war zone looks peaceful in most places, most of the time.		117
The American pledge not to negotiate with terrorists has been honored more in the breach than the observance from the moment President Ronald Reagan made it.		118
Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.	Finance	119
Before Jason Bourne, before Jack Ryan, there was Bond, James Bond, the original two-dimensional, world-saving secret agent.		120
Mr. Snowden did not start out as a spy, and calling him one bends the term past recognition. Spies don't give their secrets to journalists for free.		121
Equity is the cushion that protects financial institutions from unexpected changes in the value of their assets. The greater the leverage, the smaller the losses required to wipe out a company's equity, leaving it without enough money to repay the people who hold its debt.		122
On the New York Stock Exchange, all buy and sell orders are routed through a single 'specialist,' guaranteeing that most small trades can be matched directly. But most larger trades are delivered to the specialist on the floor of the exchange by human brokers, a system that big investors view as increasingly inefficient.		123
Generally, a rally will have staying power, technicians say, if, in addition to price movements, it has heavy trading volume and breadth, meaning that several stocks rise for each stock that falls.		124
Hedge funds try to produce above-average investment returns using tactics ranging from traditional stock-picking to complex derivative and arbitrage plays. High minimum investments, redemption restrictions and aggressive strategies make them suitable mainly for more sophisticated and well-heeled investors.		125
To finance deficits, the government must sell bonds to investors, competing for capital that could otherwise be used to invest in stocks or corporate bonds. Government borrowings raise long-term interest rates, stifling economic growth.	Finance	126
African runners regularly work out in the United States and Europe, and the International Olympic Committee sends some of the cash from the Games to Olympic committees in poor nations, which use the money to finance their own programs.	Finance	201
To economists, prices serve as crucial signals to producers and consumers. In a regulated market, the state sets prices high enough for private companies to cover their costs and earn a guaranteed profit for their investors. But in a deregulated market, prices should vary with demand and supply.		202
Some companies use off-balance-sheet partnerships to raise money or to buy assets without ever telling their shareholders in their financial statements.		203
Most unfortunately, Enron's plunge into bankruptcy court also cost many of its rank-and-file employees their savings.		204
Wal-Mart does not do big mergers, though it will buy much smaller competitors in so-called 'tuck-in acquisitions.'		205
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.		206
Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial?	Chance	207
Institutions like mutual funds often worry that if they disclose their plans to buy a stock, copycats will move quickly and drive up the stock before the purchase is completed.		208
Financial news services and other media organizations get press releases 15 minutes before they are distributed to the general public, fueling a furious competition among the news services to rewrite them for their subscribers during their window of exclusivity.		209
Higher productivity enables companies to increase sales without adding workers. Even if job markets tighten and wages rise, corporate profits can continue to climb as long as worker productivity is growing faster than overall wages.		210
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.		211
Fannie Mae is owned by shareholders but operates under a federal charter that exempts it from paying state or local taxes. As a result, many professional investors think the government would repay the debt that Fannie Mae had issued if the company could not, although Fannie Mae explicitly says that its bonds do not carry a federal guarantee.		212
It's one of the fundamental principles of the stock market: When interest rates go up, stocks go down. And along with financial companies and cyclicals, technology companies - with their sky-high price-to-earnings multiples - should be among the biggest losers in an environment of rising rates.		213
Climate change might be disastrous, but does that mean we want carbon taxes that raise the price of a gallon of heating oil to $10? And how exactly will those taxes affect economic growth?		214
Would-be drug companies must either produce medicines that stand up to federal scrutiny, demonstrate that their data has value to other companies, or go out of business.		215
Never underestimate the power of Abby Joseph Cohen.		216
Big companies often use their leverage to take stakes in would-be suppliers, especially in the technology business.		217
For chat-room tyros who expect to make their first million day-trading by age 27, paging through the Sunday newspaper with a pair of scissors just to save a couple of cents on Cheetos seems so, well, old economy.		218
At any moment, one company stands in the spotlight of the middle ring in the stock market's never-ending circus. It may not be the biggest corporation in the world, or the most profitable, but somehow it both mirrors and leads the market's broader action.		219
From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.		220
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.		221
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.		222
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.		223
The most distinguishing element of my novels is that I try as hard as I can - within the context of a popular commercial thriller - to make them feel authentic. Drawing on real locations and real events is part of that authenticity.		224
Also, most people read fiction as an escape - and I wonder whether my books aren't a bit too grounded in reality to reach the widest possible audience.		225
I think when you have lawyers arguing over whether you can keep a detainee at 46 degrees... for two hours, that's not torture. It may be unpleasant, it may be coercive... but let's say what torture actually is, and that's not it.		226
Over the years, I've spent time in Saudi Arabia, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Kenya, among other vacation hotspots.		301
Soldiers willingly, sometimes foolishly, risk their own lives to keep their comrades out of enemy hands.		302
Studies show that Avastin can prolong the lives of patients with late-stage breast and lung cancer by several months when the drug is combined with existing therapies.		303
Traditionally, companies have made major announcements before or after the close of trading so that all interested investors and analysts are apprised of the news before trading resumes in their stocks.		304
Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.		305
Rising interest rates are considered bad for stocks because they raise the cost of doing business and depress corporate earnings and because higher yields make bonds relatively more attractive than stocks to investors.		306
For more than two decades, Barry Diller has been among the most respected - and feared - figures in the entertainment industry.		307
Good spectator sports share certain fundamentals. Their competitors battle head-to-head. Their winners are determined objectively: fastest runner, most points. They are refereed, not judged.		308
Downhill track sports like luge are technology battles, as exciting as a NASCAR qualifying day.		309
Plumbing is usually boring.		310
Many newly public companies are able to post a year or two of strong sales growth off a small base, but their growth almost always slows over time, thanks to what investment professionals call 'the law of large numbers.'		311
Big swings in the wholesale price of electricity are not unusual in the summer, when high demand taxes generators' ability to supply power.		312
For as long as anyone can remember, reliable, cheap electricity has been taken for granted in the United States.		313
Business cycles lengthened greatly during the 20th century, as central banks learned to manage national economies by raising and lowering interest rates.		314
Big companies, which spend tens of billions of dollars annually on 'call centers' to take orders and provide customer support, increasingly rely on speech recognition not just to handle requests for information but to process customer orders.		315
Technology investment drove growth in the 1990s, both directly and by fueling a rising stock market that led to increased consumer spending.		316
Lower interest rates are usually considered good for stocks because they lower the cost of borrowing and make bonds a less attractive alternative investment.		317
The Fed's ability to raise and lower short-term interest rates is its primary control over the economy.		318
Trust the Canadians to produce a game about mutual funds that is actually more boring than the real thing.		319
Most companies can survive even if their debt ratings are lowered below investment grade, although they will have higher borrowing costs.		320
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.		321
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.		322
Corporate executives often buy or sell shares in their companies, and stocks rarely rise or fall significantly when those transactions are reported.		323
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.		324
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.		325
In general, investors prefer companies to reward executives for producing recurring income, not one-time gains.		326
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.		401
Even so, sometimes I wish I did have a little bit more flair in my language.		402
The market always, in theory at least, looks ahead. And it's always trying to take in every bit of information that it can as quickly as it can. You don't really care so much if the company made a dollar last year; you want to know what it's going to make this year.		403
The fact that we haven't faced another major terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11 is a very significant achievement, and one that's easy to forget - it's the dog that doesn't bark.		404
Sergeant Bergdahl may have broken any number of military laws.		405
As a reporter, I embedded for modest stints with American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. When I'm asked about those experiences, I always say - and mean - that we civilians don't deserve the soldiers we have.		406
I think in some ways what Snowden is, is he's a mix of a cold war spy novel and post-9/11 spy novel.		407
Because Genentech is a leading developer of cancer therapies, some doctors also fear that the company's pricing plans for Avastin - around $8,800 a month - may encourage other companies to charge more for their own oncology drugs.		408
Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology.		409
Some big banks remain wary of venture capital.		410
Of all the big Internet companies, Yahoo is the most highly valued on a price-earnings and price-sales basis.		411
In market valuation, Yahoo is worth about as much Walt Disney and the News Corporation combined.		412
Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, has seen a few financial schemes in his time. As the lead local prosecutor in the world's financial capital, he has battled frauds like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which stole billions of dollars from investors worldwide.		413
Fannie Mae has never publicly disclosed how much money it could lose if interest rates rose 1.5 percentage points in a very short period of time.		414
For years, critics of Fannie Mae have warned that it does not give them enough information to judge its risks.		415
The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them.		416
The world is filled with great sporting events.		417
It's no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies' managements.		418
For decades, Wall Street has charged companies a standard fee of 7 percent to sell their shares to the public.		419
While Wall Street firms typically underwrite offerings in teams, the lead underwriter, or manager, of the offering has primary responsibility for selling the offering and reaps much of the fees and profit.		420
America Online, of course, is a master of the hard sell, from stuffing mailboxes with free trial offers to forcing subscribers to click through ads before they can get their e-mail.		421
Don't expect Barton Biggs to be offering his market insights on 'Bloomberg News' anytime soon. His plumber, maybe.		422
A vote of confidence from Cisco Systems can be very important to fledging technology companies, especially if they have initial public offerings on the horizon.		423
As they grow, companies saturate their markets, become more complex and difficult to manage, and face larger and more entrenched competitors.		424
Electronic communications networks match trades between investors directly, without using a market maker or specialist as an intermediary.		425
When all the plants in a region are running at full steam, there is simply no way to get more power.		426
It is a truth universally acknowledged on Wall Street that original research is on life support. Serious research can be bad for business, as well as expensive.		501
The biggest profit center for investment banks is the hefty fees they charge for underwriting stock offerings and giving financial advice, and analysts put those profits at risk if they publish negative conclusions about the companies that pay the fees.		502
With 950 reporters and 79 bureaus, Bloomberg competes to break news with Dow Jones, Reuters and Bridge News along with newspaper Web sites, dozens of smaller Internet sites, and even gossipy chat rooms.		503
The stock prices of networking equipment companies like Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks sometimes seem as if they are priced for perpetual success.		504
Automated call centers are only the most obvious way speech recognition will be used. The software is now becoming sophisticated enough to identify speakers through 'voiceprints,' akin to fingerprints, eventually reducing the need for personal identification numbers.		505
Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.		506
It has been said that the Fed's job is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going, raising interest rates when the economy is growing too fast and inflation threatens.		507
Big fund companies have many ways to increase the returns of young funds that they want to promote. And at least one of those games involves popular offerings.		508
As the Nasdaq soared in 1999 and early 2000, demand for many offerings far exceeded the supply of shares available at the initial offering price.		509
One of the Internet's highest-profile companies, Priceline once dreamed of transforming the way consumer goods are bought and sold by offering customers the chance to 'name your own price' for a variety of products, including airline tickets.		510
In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.		511
Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.	Computers	512
Microeconomics is the study of how specific choices made by businesses, consumers and governments affect the markets for different goods and services. For example, a microeconomist might examine how price changes affect sales of apples relative to oranges.		513
The difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics is a bit like the difference between biology and medicine. Knowing that certain genes increase the risk of cancer is relatively easy. Figuring out exactly which people will get sick, or how to cure them, is a lot more complicated.		514
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.		515
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.		516
I know it's a cliche, but trust me on this. I once dated a Canadian. Canada = boring.		517
Even technology companies get good news sometimes.		518
Trailer home borrowers, mostly near the bottom of the economic ladder, often default on their loans.		519
Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.		520
Investors have been too willing to buy stocks with strong reported earnings, even if they do not understand how the earnings are produced.		521
Every public company depends to some extent on the trust of its investors.		522
The credit quality of junk bonds varies widely.		523
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.		524
As a public servant, William H. Webster has an impeccable resume.		525
Predicting the market is always tough.		526
An attack on the scale of Sept. 11 would rock the markets and the economy.		601
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.		602
At the end of 2000, most investors were optimistic that a return to quick gains could not be far off.		603
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.		604
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.	Legal	605
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.		606
Iraq is short on capital, short on electricity, and short on management expertise, but it does not lack economic enthusiasm.		607
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.		608
For a developing country, average long-run growth of 5 percent a year per capita is excellent, and 7 percent is stellar.		609
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.		610
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.		611
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.		612
HealthWell is just one of several foundations that assist patients in making their insurance co-payments for expensive drugs.		613
Federal laws against kickbacks bar pharmaceutical companies from directly giving money to patients for co-payments on the drugs they make.		614

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