NASDAQ’S BRAT PACK RIDING HIGH

What a week for the Nasdaq. Not only did the upstart exchange’s first issues join the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but it closed at higher and higher records all week, breaking the 3000 barrier only a year after it first hit 2000.

Tech stocks, of course, led the way and financials sprang back.

Drug stocks, though, were the happy surprise. Oft-spurned American Home Products Corp., left at the altar by SmithKline Beecham Plc and Monsanto Co., thought it had found a mate for life in New Jersey neighbor Warner-Lambert Co. Then Pfizer Inc. poked its way in like young Lochinvar come to spirit off the bride at the wedding. Its hostile bid, like a rising tide, lifted all drug stocks.

Entangling Allianz

Germany’s biggest insurance company, Allianz AG, followed Horace Greeley’s advice and went far west to pick up 70% of Pimco Advisors Holdings for $3.3 billion. Pacific Life Insurance Co., which owns the rest, plans to hang on to it, chairman Thomas Sutton said. Bill Gross, Pimco’s co-founder, and the rest of the staff will stay on in Newport Beach, Calif. The deal is all about bundling. Pimco runs the world’s biggest debt mutual fund, the $27 billion Total Return, and the European corporate market is growing like a leaf pile in November.

In a somewhat smaller deal, Wit Capital Group Inc. is paying $320 million in stock and options for the employee-owned SoundView Technology Group of Stamford, Conn. Bernie Siegel will remain as boss of the combo, of which Goldman Sachs Group Inc. owns a hunk.

Time to feel good

The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book brought good news on the inflation front: Wages are up in some parts of the country but for the first time since April factory orders were down. The Conference Board also reported that its leading indicators fell 0.1% in September and consumer spending was mixed.

Current betting is that the Fed’s Open Market Committee might not do anything when it meets next week, which probably means it won’t do anything until its February meeting, after the Y2K hullabaloo has died down. We hope.

Both the European Central Bank and the Bank of England raised rates, the former by a half-point, back to the level of April.

Alan Greenspan, chairman of anything he wants to be chairman of, didn’t telegraph anything in a speech to a convention of America’s Community Bankers, but he did say that the economy is healthy, job growth is robust and houses to live in are a more permanent investment than stocks.

On the fringe

The non-police blotter indicates that Chase Manhattan Corp. is cutting fourth-quarter trading revenues by $60 million because a veteran foreign exchange trader overstated forward position profits. He’s been fired and the bank isn’t saying if it was just poor eyesight or a budding Nick Leeson game, but spokesmen emphasize that no funds were misused or client accounts endangered.

A couple of blocks down Broadway, the Bank of New York decided that maintaining correspondent relationships with 200-odd banks in the former Soviet Union isn’t worth it. Why? “Who said that necessarily has something to do with money-laundering,” explained the spokesman for Ukraine’s National bank. “The Americans can have various reasons not to maintain relations with this or that bank.”

Etc. He means it

John Welch, 63, the spark plug of General Electric Co. who demands that his company be No. 1 or No. 2 in every field it enters, except money management, announced his retirement for April Fool’s Day 2001… In Korea, three Hyundai Securities execs were given suspended sentences in a $125 million stock fraud… If you can’t get enough of trading, soon you’ll be able to wheel and deal from your car, even on the chauffeur’s day off. General Motors says within two years it will be selling cars with voice-activated no-hands Internet access that talks back. You’ll never drive alone.