Reverse Spin: The Week In Review

Alan Greenspan just doesn’t understand that it’s 2000 and we’re entering a millennium where the sky’s the limit.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board focused a talk at the New York Economic Club on the need for limits, leading the market to believe, as many had anticipated, that the Federal Open Market Committee would limit itself to a quarter-point interest rate increase at its Feb. 1 meeting.

The market liked what it thought it heard, and headed up like the Washington Monument.

New Janus delay

January isn’t being very good to namesake Janus Capital Corp. The Securities and Exchange Commission has sidetracked the proposed spinoff of Stillwell Financial Corp. by Kansas City Southern Industries while it decides whether to force Stillwell to reclassify the Denver proprietor of hot mutual funds as an equity investment, rather than a consolidated subsidiary.

Statuary rape?

Martin Armstrong, the decidedly non-Ivy proprietor of Princeton Global Management and Princeton Economics International who has pleaded innocent to charges of bilking Japanese investors of up to $1 billion, is apparently out a few coins. He turned over to investigators part of the $26 million in ancient artwork and rare coins he kept in his home in Maple Shade, N.J. Much of the trove, which includes busts of Julius Caesar, the Emperor Commodus, the Empress Livia and $1 million in gold bars, is missing.

Past is prologue

Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. sees no future in futures. It’s ending much of its commodities business, including grain trading on the Chicago Board of Trade and metals trading in New York. With its futures past, it’s easy to see why. Without admitting or denying anything, it paid $81 million in New York and $10 million in London to settle charges involving a Sumitomo Corp. copper trading scheme that four years ago lost $2.6 billion.

About 150 jobs are at stake.

Earnings dive

Stock of the world’s No. 2 insurance broker, Chicago-based Aon Corp., fell by almost a third after it warned that earnings wouldn’t meet expectations because of bad results in Europe and special charges, many of them related to disputes following a workmen’s compensation plan that produced large losses for reinsurers.

Bank One also predicted 2000 earnings 60 cents or so below analysts’ estimates of $3.42 a share as it tries to figure out what to do about First USA, its recalcitrant credit card unit which is firing an undetermined number of workers.

First Union Corp.’s operating profits fell 15% in the fourth quarter, in line with forecasts, as its acquisition indigestion continues.

Virtual everything

The Office of Thrift Supervision lifted the electronic portcullis that kept E*Trade Group Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., from buying Telebanc Financial Corp. of Arlington, Va. That will create the nation’s first banker-broker combo where nobody cares where it’s based because it’s purely an Internet operation. The online stock trader is paying $1.8 billion in stock for the virtual savings and loan association. It has $3.9 billion in assets, an 800 number and some ATMs.

Ned’s beds next?

If FMR Corp. ran Fidelity Investments the way it runs Community Newspaper Co., there’d be almost as many pink slips as stock certificates around the Boston office. Fidelity’s sister, which publishes 88 weekly newspapers and 14 shoppers from Needham, Mass., cut 150 jobs. Guess the papers didn’t beat their benchmark.