WEEK IN REVIEW

Cendant descendent — and how

Cendant Corp., the Parsippany, N.J., franchiser of Avis cars and Howard Johnson hotels, buys companies that add better than they subtract. It cut its 1997 earnings twice as much as expected –by $200 million-plus — after it disclosed that the accounting disaster at its recently acquired CUC unit was not natural but made “with an intent to deceive.”

The announcement sent its stock into a Jack-and-Jill, tumbling from the low 20s to about 15 and giving quite a kick to the mutual funds that had bought in during the first quarter, when it went in the low 40s.

Morgan Stanley Institutional Aggressive had 13% of its $225 million A shares in Cendant as of March 31. Fidelity’s Magellan and Growth Company, which had included it in their top 10 holdings March 31, dumped most of it in the spring quarter, a spokesman said.

Other egg-on-face possibles are Alliance Capital Management, MFS Investment Management, Putnam Investments, American Century Investments, Capital Research and Management Co. and T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., each of which bought or held a bunch in the first quarter.

Undeterred is Cendant president Henry R. Silverman, who hauled down $44 million and change last year. He says he’s going ahead with the $3.1 billion cash-and-stock purchase of American Bankers Insurance Group, even though his stock is riding the bathyscaph.

No Suisse miss here

While Deutsche Bank AG fiddled about buying a technology investment bank, Credit Suisse First Boston burned up the phone lines, staging a preemptive strike on the sitzkrieg Germans by hiring away more than 100 of their investment bankers, analysts and salespeople. Most of them will join Frank Quattrone, George Boutros and Bill Brady, who defected July 1 to start First Boston’s global technology group.

These might not be the people Deutsche CEO Rolf Breuer had in mind in March when he said, “There are losers in this bank and we are getting rid of them.” But, hey, when you’re dumping 9,000 people worldwide, mistakes will be made.

Trump l’oeil

Author/dealmaker/bankruptcy court fixture Donald (The Donald) Trump doesn’t like it when other people use his name, even when it’s theirs.

He’s had his lawyers fire off a stiff note to Trump Financial Group in Aventura, Fla., headed by Jonathon (No Relation) Trump. According to the New York Post, The Donald suspects that No Relation may be a pseudo-Trump or a straw man brought in merely for his name.

Maybe it’s No Relation who should do the complaining. The Donald is still flogging his casinos around the market, with no takers. People seem to think they’re a bad bet, with about $1.5 billion in debt and a declining market share. Stock in Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts Inc. is somewhere under the Atlantic City Boardwalk in the $7 range, down from a 52-week high of 12 in February.

But who’s counting?

Auditors found $120 million (that’s a billion yuan) missing when they checked the accounts of J&A Securities Co. in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. Top execs of the firm, China’s second-largest brokerage — it’s essentially the finance arm of the country’s armed forces — are under investigation…Fidelity Investments, despite its rapidly growing $3.5 billion in assets in Japan, doesn’t expect to see any profits there for two or three years… American International Group, Zurich Insurance Co. and ING Groep NV are among companies applying to manage Poland’s coming private pension funds, expected to hit $30 billion in 10 years. . . Investcorp Bank, the Bahrain investment company formed a decade and a half ago by a defecting Chase Manhattan Corp. squad, is shopping around Simmons Corp. — yup, the mattress-maker. Last week Investcorp sold the parent of Saks Fifth Avenue.

Bloomberg News contributed to this report