Gambia-L,
Some of this articles in the following text might be stale but I hope some of
you find them informative an interesting.

Have a great weekend.

Momodou Camara

------- Forwarded message follows -------

The Empire Whimpers: Corporate Amerika Implodes
Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit
The Empire Whimpers

WORLDCOM'S $3.8 BILLION SCANDAL SENDS STOCKS, US DOLLAR
INTO THE MUD;
AMTRAK MIGHT LIMP THROUGH SEPTEMBER WITH $200 MILLION
FROM FEDS

[George Bush might just be the US President to preside over the
nationalization of major strategic national industries -- railroads,
telecommunications, airlines... Fidel Castro, who has aptly described
international capitalism as a "giant casino," might be able to give
the po' boy from Texas some lessons on how it's done.

With the help of his team of thieves who've stolen everything they
can get their hands on (including the 2000 Presidential election),
the half-wit occupying the White House has brought down the Empire --
he needed no help from Osama bin Laden. Global Crossing's value
evaporated in an overnight bankruptcy; Qwest Communications seems to
be next in the line of collapsing houses of cards; the value of the
yankee dollar is in the toilet while investors flock to gold; despite
three Japanese interventions overnight on June 25-26 to prop up the
dollar, the Euro made gains and is now at near-parity with the yankee
buck.

The shell game of American Capitalism is folding. The casino is
exposed for what it is. Too bad for investors, too bad for employees
who lose their pensions and their jobs. The corporate directors walk
with billions in loans, bonuses and obscene salaries skimmed off
during the boom years of merger mania.

It's all such poetic justice -- after all, it was Daddy Bush who
privatized the Internet.]

                                 *

Reuters Market News - June 26, 2002 via Yahoo

US, Amtrak in tentative deal to end crisis

WASHINGTON, June 26 (Reuters) - The Transportation Department and
Amtrak reached a tentative deal late on Wednesday for a bailout that
would resolve the railroad's immediate financial crisis and avert a
shutdown threatened for as early as next week.

In a joint statement Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and
Amtrak Chairman John Robert Smith said the two sides had made
"excellent progress" in bringing the crisis to an end, and were on
track to finalize the deal possibly by Thursday.

While details were not disclosed by the Transportation Department or
Amtrak, a government source said the two sides agreed to take a
two-stage approach.

First, the government would directly lend Amtrak $100 million to
cover spending priorities for the first half of the summer. In the
second stage, the Bush administration would work with Congress to
come up with another $100 million at least to keep the trains running
through September.

Congress, which leaves town on Friday for its July Fourth recess,
could either appropriate the additional funds or agree to a loan
guarantee. That would enable Amtrak to borrow the money it needs from
its banks.

                           *

BBC online - Wednesday, 26 June, 2002
http://www.bbc.co.uk

Shares Plunge on WorldCom Scandal
Shares on Wall Street have plunged in response to news of a massive
accounting fraud at US telecoms firm WorldCom.

Within half an hour of the opening bell at 1330 GMT, the blue-chip
Dow Jones index was down 133.19 points or about 1.3% to 8,993.63.

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq index - where  WorldCom and the bulk of its
fellow technology stocks are listed - had dropped 3%, or 44.12 points
to 1,379.87, a new low for the year.

The falls followed a torrid morning on the  European exchanges after
WorldCom's announcement that it had overstated its profits.

By 1400 GMT, London's FTSE 100 blue-chip share index was down 131.6
points to 4,499.4, not far above the five-year lows hit just after 11
September.

Germany's Dax index and the French Cac-40 had fallen even further,
each losing about 4% of their value by the same time.

The euro, which has been creeping higher against the dollar in recent
weeks, broke through $0.99 for the first time since 1999.

The legacy of Enron

In the aftermath of the collapse of US energy company Enron late last
year, investors have become nervous about both the honesty of
accounting practices at big firms, and the fundamental health of
corporate America.

Now WorldCom, the number two long-distance phone company in the US,
has revealed that its profits between January 2001 and March 2002
were overstated by $3.8bn (=A32.5bn).=20

The result has been a rout in technology, media and telecom stocks -
first in Asia, where Tokyo's Nikkei 225 fell more than 4%, then in
Europe.

Banks have also taken a pounding as investors scrabbled to avoid
those they suspected might be exposed to WorldCom's debts.

The next stop is the US, where the blue-chip Dow Jones industrial
average is still smarting from massive falls in recent weeks and a
155-point tumble on Tuesday, before the news broke.

Biggest Losers [in Europe]:

 - Alcatel (down 18%)
 - France Telecom (down 13.7%)
 - Vivendi Universal (down 13%)
 - Xansa (down 11%)
 - Axa (down 6.9%)
 - Zurich Financial (down 6.9%)
 - Ericsson (down 6%)
 - Friends Provident (down 6.75%)
 - Siemens (down 6%)
 - Nokia (down 5.8%)
 - Vodafone (down 5.75%)
 - Prudential (down 5.5%)
 - Deutsche Telekom (down 5.5%)
 - Royal Sun & Alliance (down 5.5%)
 - Abbey National (down 5.25%)
 - Lloyds TSB (down 5%)
 - British Telecom (down 4.5%)

Market falls on Wednesday have reflected WorldCom's disgrace as well
more general problems with companies such as Vivendi Universal,
France Telecom and Alcatel.

"We have convergence of dodgy accounting, plus telecoms and
over-indebtedness," said Robert Kerr, European strategist at Bank of
America.

"It's the trigger of the beginning of the final wash-out, but I don't
think this is the final wash-out."

Nomura, the Japanese investment bank, was even more scathing.
WorldCom, it said, "has delivered the final blow to trust in the US
equity market."

"There was plenty of other unpleasant news in the background, but
WorldCom is a timely reminder that Enronitis was a systemic problem,"
Nomura economist Anais Faraj said.

"Even though the markets were never going to go onwards and upwards
for ever, the US markets had priced in perpetual growth," he told BBC
News Online.

"Basically, the US market is dead now."

Losers

Vivendi Universal has taken a battering in recent days after a
controversial deal to reduce its stake in its utilities arm, and
criticism of its chief executive Jean-Marie Messier.

There were also concerns from the French government about France
Telecom's level of debt, while Alcatel was hit after launching a new
restructuring plan and issuing a profit warning.

The UK insurer Prudential suffered in particular because of its
reported exposure to WorldCom debt.

Shares in the Pru sank more than 5% in early trading.

"WorldCom is a good alibi for a bit more flogging of the market,"
added Mr Kerr.

Shock waves around the world

The WorldCom announcement came after the US markets had closed on
Tuesday and in after-hours trading the company's stock plunged 58% to
35 cents.

Stocks in Tokyo fell 4% overnight on the news, with the telecoms
sector hit particularly hard, while shares in South Korea fell 7.4%.

                                *
CNN - June 26, 2002
http://money.cnn.com/2002/06/26/news/worldcom_shoedrops/index.htm


THE DEATH OF CONFIDENCE

WorldCom's gigantic fraud may send investors to the exits for a long,
long time.
by Justin Lahart


NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Tuesday night, the other shoe dropped.  Ever
since Enron, investors have worried that something big was lurking in
the wings. A steady stream of scandal -- Global Crossing, Qwest
Peregrine, Adelphia -- kept the fear alive. And so it came: WorldCom,
perpetrator of what looks like one of the biggest accounting frauds
in history. If trust in Corporate America was already broken, now
it's in shambles. With that, many investors may decide to exit the
U.S. stock market. And not come back.

"I think you're going to have people withdraw money for good," says
Todd Clark, managing director of listed trading at Wells Fargo
Securities.  "People are going to say, 'I'd rather bet on the New
York Giants because I have a better chance of guessing the result
than of knowing what some management team is up to.'"

With the market whipping lower before a late-day recovery took it
back to the flatline, Clark's worry was echoing all over Wall Street.

"We're seeing basically complete distrust in financial accounting in
the Western Hemisphere," says Phil Ruffat of Mizuho Securities USA's
futures division. "People are going to pack it up and go."

Of particular concern is global investors who, to judge from the
recent declines in the dollar, had already been pulling money from
our fair shores. Ruffat, who works closely with Japanese clients,
says that foreign confidence in U.S. assets has fallen to a new low.

If that's what it's come to, one of the main drivers of the 1990s
bull market has been turned on its head. Stringent accounting
standards and active shareholder participation were supposed to make
companies here more transparent than they had been in the past. This
meant the risk of owning U.S. stocks was low both historically and
compared to places like Japan.

And so both here and abroad investors ploughed money into our stock
market. Paul Kasriel, chief U.S. economist at Northern Trust, points
out that by the end of 2000 foreigners owned financial assets close
to 25 percent of the U.S. capital stock, up from 11 percent in 1990.
It is hard, he thinks, to imagine foreigners keeping up that level of
investment given what's going on.

"Even without the fraud," says Kasriel, "return on capital has been
plumbing the depths, the United States is at war, government spending
exploding to the upside and we're imposing tariffs on steel and
lumber.  What's to like?"

And of course it's not just foreign investors who might be asking
that question. U.S. investors have been just as burned, and have just
as much reason for disgust at the shenanigans companies have played,
as their foreign counterparts. There are plenty of places to put
money besides stocks (bonds, money markets, gold, under the mattress)
and plenty of people may opt to do just that.

While many market watchers, attuned to the big market bouncebacks
from 1987, 1997 and 1998 talk of "capitulation" -- a period of blind
selling that puts a firm bottom on stocks and marks the new bull
phase -- the WorldCom debacle could just as easily mark the beginning
of a long period of disinterest, where the stock market ends up being
no better than a mugs game.

"We're taking a lot of the people out of the market permanently,"
says Bollinger Capital head John Bollinger. "We're losing a whole
generation of investors."

What Bollinger expects is not the V-shaped rebound so many investors
hope for but something like the long grind the U.S. saw in the 1970s
and that Japan has been seeing for the past 13 years. After topping
out at 1,050 in 1973, the Dow Jones Industrial Average wasn't able to
pull clear of the 1,000 level until 1982. Tokyo's Nikkei hit its high
back in 1989 and has ground steadily lower ever since then.

Maybe the prognosis for U.S. stocks isn't so dire as that but one
thing seems certain: investors who think WorldCom is the end of the
accounting imbroglio are in for disappointments. What's so
disappointing about WorldCom is that it proves the cockroach theory
-- where there was Enron, there was more.

"Telecom is where people thought the next Enron was going to be, and
they weren't disappointed," says David Hawkins, a Harvard Business
School professor who acts as an advisor to Merrill Lynch on
accounting issues. Hawkins suspects that the breed of fraud that
happened at WorldCom -- treating expenses as capital expenditures --
probably happened elsewhere in the telecom arena.

With that kind of backdrop, some investors suspect that any rallies
in the weeks to come will be short-lived. "The feeling is that
confidence in corporate America has deteriorated so much that maybe
you're going to see the typical step up, followed by multiple steps
down," said Seth Tobias of the New York-based hedge fund Circle T.

And as for those responsible for the WorldCom debacle?

"I hope these people go to jail," says Tobias.

========================================================
=========
  NY Transfer News Collective   *   A Service of Blythe Systems
           Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
              339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012
  http://www.blythe.org                  e-mail: [log in to unmask]
========================================================
=========
               ----  provided by  infoPool News Service  ----
------- End of forwarded message -------

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~