Reverse spin / The week in Review

Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., the No. 1 broker, reported its quarterly profits had doubled, thank to brokerage profits. And in the mano à mano with Charles Schwab Corp., Merrill won the new-money leg, beating clicks-only Schwab, $36 billion to $33 billion. The $1,500-a-year-Unlimited Advantage web accounts, introduced in the summer, pulled in $6 billion of new money in the fourth quarter, for a total of $63 billion.

Dow Jones & Co. reported a 40% jump in fourth-quarter earnings, thanks to all that Christmas advertising in its financial publications. It also made money for the first time in television, after six years.

American Express Co. said quarterly profits were up 15%, with the adviser unit’s bottom line up only 14%. It also reported that it, had added 10% more advisers over the year, bringing its total to 11,366.

Left unsaid was…

The news for managers of money in President Clinton’s State of the Union message isn’t in what he said — $350 billion in tax cuts, focusing on middle-income people and eliminating the marriage penalty — but on what he didn’t say. He made no mention of the big item in last year’s address, universal savings accounts — USAs he called them — a plan that quickly vanished down a Capitol Hill rat hole, or of individual accounts in Social Security.

That kind of saving Social Security will apparently have to await the new president. Meanwhile the old one is off to Davos, Switzerland, a first for a sitting American leader, where he’ll hobnob with a thousand dozen business leaders and such political notables as Tony Blair, King Abdullah II of Jordan and the president of Mozambique. What better place to look for a job?

The naked truth

On the police blotter, the U.S. attorney’s office in New York is looking into perjury charges against Joseph Luethke, the middleman in Christian Curry’s $1.78 billion racial discrimination suit against Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. You recall that Mr. Luethke received 10 grand from the company for helping set up Mr. Curry, whose firing as an analyst, the company says, had nothing to do with nude photos of him that appeared in a gay porno magazine.

Morgan Stanley also was fined $495,000 by the National Association of Securities Dealers on charges that in 1995 it fixed the price of nine stocks on the Nasdaq 100 Index. The company is thinking of appealing.

In Pittsburgh, John Gardner Black, 55, pleaded guilty to talking 50 Pennsylvania school districts into putting construction money into risky investments and hiding $71 million in losses. He faces 130 years in prison and a $14.8 million fine. He’s already agreed to repay $3.6 million.

Offshore onshore

Anybody can set up an offshore bank offshore, but it helps to be a Native American to set up an offshore bank in the middle of landlocked Montana. The Blackfeet Tribe is the first outfit to take advantage of a law the Big Sky legislature passed in 1997 allowing individuals and corporations to set up foreign depositories. The tribe has created Glacier International Depository Ltd. on Indian land near Glacier National Park to hunt down money from wealthy foreigners. So far $2.4 billion has been pledged, says bank chairman Robert “Smokey” Doore.

Alphainflation

IBM Corp. is rumored to be joining computers with the consulting unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, either in a partnership or as a buyout. What would you call something like that? PricewaterIBMhouseCoopers LLP? PrIBMcewater-houseCoopers LLP? PricewaterhouseCoopersIBM LLP Corp.? Anyway you slice it, the name would have more letters than there are in the alphabet.