Wall Street faces tougher times making money and doing deals.
And it also has to worry about regulators who may want to fix too
much.
By Alex Taylor III
FINANCIAL PANIC. Just weeks ago the phrase was a history book
curiosity that seemingly had no meaning in the modern age. No more.
Stock markets around the world have just gone through a classic panic,
unique in its high-tech mechanics and the magnitude of the price
collapse but no different in substance or dynamics from those of 1929
and 1907.
What set it off? Pundits, politicians, and professional investors
cite an array of causes. The failure of Congress and the Administration
to deal adequately with the federal budget deficit. The stubbornly high
U.S. trade deficit. Deepening crisis in the Middle East. Treasury
Secretary James Baker's threat to force the dollar down sharply against
the German mark. The pernicious influence of so-called program traders
on Wall Street.
Proposed tax legislation that could bring corporate
takeovers, and even friendly acquisitions, to a dead halt. Tight
monetary policy that left the markets starved for liquidity and helped
push interest rates on government bonds above 10%. Many of those surely
affected the market. But the world will never really know why panic
suddenly ruled, why the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 508 points
on October 19 and not a week earlier or a month later. The most we can
know is that stock prices had reached awesome heights, that many
investors had been worrying for months that a drop was coming, and that
suddenly a multitude tried to get out at once. As Warren Buffett, one of
those most bloodied in the crash, observes: ''When the tulip boom broke
in 1636, did people in the Netherlands say they shouldn't have changed
the discount rate?''
Even without the why, investors and policymakers have much to learn
from what happened in the panic of 1987 and how it played out. Some
lessons are startlingly different from the early impressions in the days
immediately following the carnage. Overall, the securities industry
served its customers well. But some parts of the market system failed
utterly. The industry -- and the rules it operates under -- are bound to
change dramatically because of those failures, and in ways that will
affect virtually everyone who uses the market.
Understanding what really happened is essential to making sure the
changes are the right ones. What the industry needs now is a fresh
infusion of capital backing up market makers on the exchanges. It does
not need sweeping new regulations or supervision. The collapse really
began on Wednesday, October 14, when the Dow tumbled 95 points. The
release of disappointing trade statistics for August apparently spooked
many investors that day. Rising interest rates also dragged stocks down
by luring pension fund money out of the market. As money manager Jeremy
Grantham of Boston's Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo said, ''After the
greatest bull market in history, U.S. Treasury bonds yielding 10% are as
close as you can get to a free lunch.'' More pressure was coming via an
esoteric trading strategy known as portfolio insurance. In the days
that followed, portfolio insurance and ''program trading'' -- the most
common form of which is arbitrage between stocks and futures contracts
on stock indexes -- became the designated villains of the game.
FEEDING THE FEARS
Portfolio insurance is a technique by which institutional investors,
mostly pension funds, try to limit losses on their stock portfolios
during down markets. The concept behind it is straightforward: As the
stocks in a portfolio decline, the manager sells some and invests the
proceeds in something safe such as Treasury bills. The further stocks
drop, the more the manager sells, until he has shifted all his assets to
T-bills. But selling lots of stock -- and then buying back when prices
rise, the second part of the strategy -- is costly and cumbersome. So
the money management firms that provide portfolio insurance accomplish
the same goal by using futures contracts on stock market indexes to
hedge the portfolios.
Devised just five years ago, stock index futures represent contracts
to buy -- or sell -- a basket of stocks such as the Standard &
Poor's 500 index at a specified time in the future.
The contracts
ultimately are settled in cash, not in the stocks themselves, according
to how much the index rises or falls before the expiration date. As
stock prices decline, the insurance providers sell index futures short.
If stocks go still lower, the price of the futures contract will also
decline, and the pension fund will have a profit on its short position
that offsets some of the loss on the stocks it owns. The more stocks
fall, the more contracts the insurance providers sell. The value of
assets protected by portfolio insurance has risen explosively over the
past two years, from about $15 billion to perhaps $60 billion. But that
represents only about 6% of the money pension funds have invested in
stocks (and 2% of the total value of stock outstanding before the
crash).
The insurance programs are run by a handful of money managers,
including Wells Fargo, Bankers Trust, Morgan Guaranty, and Leland
O'Brien Rubinstein, the Los Angeles firm that invented the technique. In
the tumbling market of October 14, portfolio insurers sold more and
more futures contracts short. The steady selling of index futures
probably helped drag stock prices lower, triggering still more selling
of futures by insurers. Many critics of portfolio insurance say this
chain of events was artificially contributing to the price decline. In
fact, that is like blaming a murder on the weapon.
It was the pension
funds' decision to lock in their gains from the bull market as soon as
prices started to slide that actually created the pressure. Once that
decision was made, they likely would have had the same influence on the
market whether they sold futures contracts or protected themselves the
old-fashioned way, selling the underlying stocks. Risk arbitragers --
the guys who load up on takeover stocks, hoping to make a killing --
also played a role. Fear of tax proposals in Washington apparently
persuaded some of them to pull out of the market. The Democrats on the
House Ways and Means Committee had just approved a plan to eliminate
almost all interest deductions for debt used in acquisitions. The stocks
of takeover targets, including Dayton Hudson and Newmont Mining,
tumbled even more than the Dow on Friday, October 16.
And did the Dow tumble. The average dropped more than 100 points for
the first time, on record volume of 338 million shares. For the week,
the Dow was down 235 points, or 9.5%, the worst performance in nearly 50
years. Many Wall Streeters saw disaster ahead. After the close on
Friday, Peter DaPuzzo, the head of over-the-counter trading at Shearson
Lehman Brothers, assembled his 60 traders, opened bottles of champagne,
and told them to prepare for big trouble on Monday. Trading would likely
be frantic and Shearson could take large losses by continuing to make a
market in the 2,500 mostly small-company OTC stocks it trades. Market
makers have to stand ready to buy when others are unwilling. Shearson
had spent years, and lots of money, building its reputation in the OTC
market. ''Now,'' said DaPuzzo, ''I want to make sure we keep our
reputation going.'' But even DaPuzzo had no idea of what was ahead.
DON'T BLAME FOREIGNERS
The
tsunami started in Tokyo when that market opened at 7 P.M. Sunday New
York time, and grew as it rolled around the world through Hong Kong,
Frankfurt, Paris, and London on its way to New York. Every foreign
market was selling through the floor, making it absolutely certain, even
before the opening bell, that Wall Street was about to get creamed. As
the world economy has become increasingly interdependent, far-flung
stock markets have come to move much more in tandem. Says William A.
Schreyer, chairman of Merrill Lynch: ''I never thought I'd get up and
turn on the TV to see what Tokyo was doing. Now I do.''
Panic was palpable by the time Monday's opening bell sounded on the
New York Stock Exchange floor. More than 600 million shares changed
hands that day as the Dow collapsed by 22.6%. Pension funds furiously
sold stock. Individuals raced to cash in before their bull-market gains
evaporated. So many sold mutual fund shares that Fidelity Investments,
one of the largest fund managers, had to extend the time it took to pay
customers from one day to seven, tapping bank credit lines to meet
redemptions.
Takeover artists and leveraged buyout firms, which had given the
market much upward propulsion, swiftly backed away from pending deals
that made no sense in a crash. Carl Icahn, who had announced final terms
of his bid to take TWA private on Friday, canceled the offer on
Tuesday. Herbert and Robert Haft decided that they wouldn't pursue
Dayton Hudson after all. Samuel Heyman, chairman of GAF, postponed his
plan to take that company private. Risk arbitragers took their worst
drubbing ever as the deals collapsed around them and they sold out at
distress prices. Michael L. Goldstein, a security industry analyst at
Sanford C. Bernstein, estimates that the risk arbitrage departments at
Goldman Sachs, First Boston, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and Salomon
Brothers, which had a combined inventory of about $1.5 billion of stock,
lost at least $200 million. Others estimate the losses as high as $500
million.
One group that apparently did not sell in force was foreign
investors. Over the preceding 18 months, they had assumed a major role
in sustaining the great bull market. In 1986, net foreign purchases of
U.S. equities more than tripled from the prior peak to $18.6 billion.
During the first six months of 1987, foreign buyers were even more
ebullient, adding $18.4 billion to their U.S. stock portfolios. The
psychological lift this buying brought far exceeded its pure dollar
clout. Says Laszlo Birinyi, head market analyst with Salomon Brothers:
''For time zone reasons, foreign investors tend to be most active in the
first half hour of trading. They've been setting the tone for the
market.''
Many market analysts had worried that the foreigners could set a very
different tone if they suddenly decided to dump U.S. stocks in favor of
other assets. Foreign stock purchases did soften in August, when U.S.
share prices peaked. But they did not lead the stampede. Says David
Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities in New York: ''There has
not been a flood of sell orders from Japan. This was a domestic U.S.
selloff.'' Hector Sants, New York-based first vice president of
Switzerland's UBS Securities, describes foreign investors as frozen
''like rabbits caught in the headlights.'' By the time they got their
bearings, most concluded it was too late to sell.
Equity-minded foreigners could find little refuge in their own
markets, as the tsunami continued around the globe. Hardest hit
initially were Singapore and Australia, whose markets fell roughly 30%
in a week. Britain, Europe's biggest market, paid the price for
leadership and fell 22%, the worst showing in Europe. The day after
Black Monday the highflying Tokyo stock market suffered its steepest
one-day drop in more than 30 years, but it ended the week down a
relatively modest 12%. Not so lucky were investors in Hong Kong.
That market shut down for four days. The day it reopened, prices
dropped 33%. Closing in the face of trouble virtually guaranteed that
the Hong Kong exchange will now be eclipsed by its rival, Singapore.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the panic was that it could have
caused a total breakdown of the U.S. stock market. The most encouraging,
plainly, is that the market did not fail, and that the NYSE traded an
astounding 600 million shares on such a wild and treacherous day. The
torrent of sell orders overwhelmed the specialists on the floor of the
New York Stock Exchange. Specialists make sure that buyers and sellers
come together in an ''orderly'' fashion. Unlike the OTC market makers,
the specialists have monopolies. Each stock is handled by just one
specialist firm, which gets a fee for every share it trades. In return
for their monopolies, specialists are supposed to stand ready to sell
from, or buy for, their own inventory when orders are out of balance.
The NYSE specialists had lost millions fulfilling that role the prior
week, buying stock from an excess of sellers and watching the shares
decline in value.
Nothing orderly happened on Black Monday. The specialists who handle
the biggest blue-chip stocks met with sell orders they could not begin
to absorb. The specialists had little choice but to lower their bids as
fast as the exchange's rules would permit. They also had to buy enormous
quantities of shares themselves. By the end of the day, the NYSE
specialists were holding $1.5 billion of stocks, ten times the norm.
Even so, many critics said that the specialists exacerbated the
market rout by buying too few shares. Says the chief financial officer
of a FORTUNE 500 company: ''When the sell orders poured in, our
specialist ran into a cave.'' Some specialists undoubtedly shirked
responsibility. But as a group they stood straight enough to facilitate
more trading volume in a single day than took place on the NYSE in all
of 1950. And, after the prior week's hit, the 52 specialist firms
absorbed one-day losses of around $1 billion, roughly a third of their
capital. The damage was so bad that the next morning the specialists
were quietly advised that they could, when absolutely necessary, bend
the rules that normally govern their trading.
The message, in effect, was ''Do what you have to do to stay
solvent.'' The NYSE specialists shined in comparison with their
counterparts in the OTC market, the broker-dealers who make markets in
unlisted stocks. That plainly was a losing proposition during the panic;
market makers could be sure that the whole world was waiting to dump
stock into their laps. So many opted out of the action.
As a result, volume in the OTC market did not increase nearly as much
as it did on the NYSE, and prices jumped even more wildly from trade to
trade. Brokers and institutional investors have complained that market
makers simply were not making markets in most stocks. Two notable
exceptions among the OTC market makers were Merrill Lynch and DaPuzzo's
crew at Shearson, both of which got high marks up and down Wall Street
for continuing to buy stocks. But preserving Shearson's reputation was
costly. DaPuzzo says the firm's OTC operation lost as much in three days
as it had made in the prior six months, and its inventory of stocks,
normally about $100 million, leaped to $250 million.
Legions of individual investors had problems getting phones answered
as well. Brokerage offices were so busy that some callers never got
through, and others finally delivered their orders in person. Even when
they got orders to their brokers, investors couldn't be certain when
they would be executed or at what price. A New York broker says he could
not fill customers' orders on Black Monday because the two computer
operators who relay them to the NYSE trading floor could not handle the
incredible volume. Buy and sell orders piled up into a tall stack beside
the operators, and once there could not be changed. The market debacle
had few heroes, but one turned out to be the Federal Reserve. Before the
market opened on the morning after, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan
lessened the anxiety with a one-sentence statement that the central bank
would provide all necessary liquidity. Then the Fed came through as
promised, and with impressive finesse.
THE CALL THAT MOVES MONEY
AT 11:30 TUESDAY morning, the head federal funds trader at a major
New York commercial bank, one of 40 ''primary dealers'' in government
securities, got a call on his direct line from the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York. He listened for a second. Then he covered the mouthpiece
with his hand and shouted ''Two- day system'' as loud as he could. Those
words of money-market jargon spoke volumes for the 250 traders within
earshot on the floor around him. ''System'' signaled that the Federal
Reserve System wanted to buy Treasury securities for its own account,
injecting new money into the market.
This is the Fed's most immediate tool for controlling the money
supply. ''Two-day'' meant that the purchases would be under agreements
to sell the securities back to the owners two days later, which is what
the Fed does when it wants to temporarily boost liquidity.
No less significant was the timing of the call. The Fed normally buys
or sells at 11:40 each morning; traders call it ''Fed time.'' Ten
minutes early means something special is afoot, most likely that the Fed
wants to buy more securities than normal and needs more time to process
the bids that flow in from the primary dealers. New York Fed officials
bought every day that week and into the next, sometimes calling the
primary dealers as early as 10 A.M.
Their actions helped - push both short- and long-term interest rates
down about a percentage point in just two days. Yet the initial
purchases were not unusually large. Says Donald J. Fine, chief market
analyst at Chase Manhattan: ''They are doing things they would do
anyway, but they're doing them earlier in the day and visibly.'' The Fed
was telegraphing its punches so no one had any doubts about the policy.
By contrast, Fed officials in Washington were nearly invisible during
the week of the crash, but they were busy nonetheless. Among other
things, they got on the phones and asked big banks to continue lending
to ailing Wall Street firms.
If the Fed wore the white hat through the crisis, the black was
pinned to the heads of the portfolio insurance crowd trading on the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange. By most accounts, their actions created
much of the fear that gripped investors and pushed stock prices down
further than they otherwise would have gone. Early Monday, insurers and
speculators sold so many futures contracts that the futures dropped 15%
below the S&P index. Ordinarily, a discrepancy of just 0.5% would
kick off enough futures buying to push the futures price back up into
line with the index.
This buying would normally be done by program traders --
lightning-quick arbitragers who rely on computers to monitor the
relationship between the stock indexes and prices of index futures. When
the spread between the two gets to 0.5% or more, as in the days before
the crash, these arbitragers have an opportunity to lock in a guaranteed
profit by buying huge quantities of the lesser-priced one and selling
corresponding amounts of the higher-priced.
This is the classic ''riskless'' variety of arbitrage, not to be
confused with merger-related risk arbitrage. The program traders are
brokerage firms, pension fund managers, and other large financial
institutions. They can profitably exploit slight price discrepancies
because of the speed with which they trade. Their computers first tell
them how many shares of which companies in the S&P index to buy or
sell, and their brokers electronically transmit the orders through the
NYSE's automatic order entry system (known as the DOT system, for
designated order turnaround) to the specialists on the floor. The DOT
system enables program traders to execute trades of hundreds of
different stocks almost instantly.
Simultaneously, program traders lock in their profits by placing an
offsetting order for futures contracts at exchanges like the Chicago
Merc. By the close of trading on October 19, John Phelan, chairman of
the NYSE, was worrying that program trading and portfolio insurance --
and the stock- index futures they rely on -- could have been a prime
cause of the debacle. The next day he ''asked'' -- it was tantamount to a
command -- NYSE members to stop using DOT for program trading
arbitrage.
Ever since, regulators and Congressmen have been saying that strict
new controls are probably needed on index futures, and program trading
has taken on the aura of the manipulative stock pools of the Twenties.
The wild drop in the S&P index futures contract almost certainly did
feed investors' fears and cause more of them to sell. But the
indictment of program trading and portfolio insurance seems off base --
though it does conveniently strike at the Merc, a gnawing competitor of
Phelan's NYSE. In fact, the problem may have been too little program
trading, not too much.
NEEDED: MORE INSURANCE
Unlike speculators and investors, who move markets by buying or
selling, program traders have a neutral effect on prices. For example,
at the same time they are selling stocks on the NYSE, they are buying
index futures on the Merc. That 15% spread between the S&P and the
futures contract on Monday represented an unprecedented profit
opportunity. Ordinarily they would have bought index futures and sold
stocks until they had driven the futures up to the level of the S&P,
and eliminated that scary specter in Chicago. But the specter just kept
sitting there because program traders weren't trading that day. They
apparently were heavy sellers early in the session of the largest stocks
that make up the S&P, adding to the pile of orders that swamped the
specialists.
But it proved impossible for them to get a clear fix on where stocks
were trading at any moment. IBM, Exxon, Digital Equipment, and many
other stocks that make up a significant portion of the S&P 500's
value opened late. Throughout the session, frequent order imbalances
brought further delays. At times, price information on the tape ran
nearly two hours behind. Since they could not be sure at what price they
would end up selling stocks or buying futures, the program traders
could not trade. Bruce Collins, head of equity arbitrage research at
Shearson, says that to do so ''would have been speculation, not
arbitrage.'' Phelan has said that arbitrage program trading accounted
for 15% of the Monday volume on the NYSE. Leo Melamed, chairman of the
executive committee of the Merc, says the true figure was under 10% --
less than normal.
Meanwhile, the gaping spread between futures contracts and the
S&P index rendered portfolio insurance strategies unworkable. Most
portfolio-insurance computer models indicated that the portfolios should
have been almost completely hedged -- that is, that the pension-fund
clients should have been short index futures equal to nearly the total
value of their stock portfolios. But the price gap, along with the
difficulty of finding buyers for large futures positions at any price,
rendered it impossible to hedge.
Most portfolio insurers told clients that they should forget about
trying to hedge at least until the spread narrowed. Some pension-fund
clients took that advice and stood pat. But others, fearful that further
stock price declines would leave them with intolerable losses, opted
simply to sell stocks outright. Says a portfolio insurance strategist
with a West Coast firm: ''One client who was concerned that the
portfolio insurance wasn't working called us and said, 'If you can't
cover us with futures, then get us out of the stock. We're not worried
about details like execution costs. Just get us out.' ''
Hayne Leland, who with partner Mark Rubinstein devised the first
portfolio insurance strategies, says the NYSE acted ''purposefully'' to
break the ability of program traders to perform their service. Another
portfolio insurer calls the controversy over program trading ''a head-on
collision between two highly efficient auction markets, the NYSE and
the Merc'' -- a war over which will be the dominant market. Phelan says
he took his action without regard to the Merc.
Though the breakdown of insurance cost pension funds money, they
still have fared better than most stock market investors. One portfolio
insurer says customers lost only a few percentage points more than the
5% to 10% that was supposed to be their maximum exposure. The calls for
government action in the aftermath of last week's crash have already
reached peak volume.
Every regulatory body having anything to do with the securities
business is conducting an investigation. They include the NYSE itself,
the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the House Banking
Committee, the Senate Banking Committee, and a special panel appointed
by President Reagan and headed by Nicholas Brady, chairman of the Dillon
Read investment banking firm. & Though much remains to be
understood, it seems unreasonable to talk about severely restricting the
futures markets until it is clear that they really do cause trouble.
Critics of index futures argue that they lead to more volatility in
stock prices, but the case remains to be proved. The SEC has already
made a special study of futures action during a nasty two-day drop in
the Dow in September 1986. ''What we found,'' says Commissioner Joseph
A. Grundfest, ''was that program trading and portfolio insurance had
very little effect. I'm not saying that's what we'll find this time. The
truth is what the facts say it is.'' In the final analysis, portfolio
insurance is nothing more than a dressed-up version of a stop-loss order
-- a standing order to sell a stock if it drops to a specified price --
that has been around for decades.
The futures trading used in portfolio insurance does indeed speed up
trading. But so do the concentration of capital in the hands of
institutional investors and computer networks that give traders access
to newsworthy information the moment it becomes available.
Defenders of
index futures argue that they play an important role in making markets
more efficient by enabling pension funds and other investors to transfer
some of the risk in stocks to speculators and others more willing to
live with it. Says Fischer Black of Goldman Sachs, a creator of the
options pricing model that Leland and Rubinstein used to develop
portfolio insurance: ''If you limit portfolio insurance, you will simply
hurt investors -- it hurts people to limit them to one market or the
other.''
THE CASE FOR REFORM
Yet even Black acknowledges that some reforms probably are needed at
the Merc: ''The way to solve the problems we're getting into mainly
involves tighter margin requirements.'' Currently, only $20,000 in
margin money has to be put up to control a contract worth more than
$115,000. Black says the rule should be in line with the 50% margin
requirements on stock purchases. Congress and the regulators should not
limit their inquiries to the futures exchanges.
A second day like October 19 probably would have wiped out most
specialists on the NYSE and brought the entire market tumbling down. It
seems sensible to beef up their capital requirements, and it may also be
time to break the monopolies and allow competition among many
specialists in a single stock. But a whole new skein of regulation,
always a danger with so many investigations under way, seems
ill-advised.
Whatever happens in Washington, Wall Street has entered an era of
profound change. In some ways, the new market looks dandy for
dealmakers. Mark Solow, head of acquisition lending at Manufacturers
Hanover, talks about ''the tremendous opportunities'' that will exist
''once the stock market stabilizes.''
One buyer who hasn't been waiting for that is Michael Dingman, head
of the Henley Group, who took advantage of tumbling prices by acquiring
Santa Fe Southern Pacific stock in the market, adding to a block he
accumulated earlier. And Sam Heyman, having scuttled the GAF deal, has
been buying GAF stock in the market at about 60% of the price he would
have paid in his going-private plan. Another factor encouraging deals is
the amount of money in the hands of some dealmakers. Theodore
Forstmann, head of the big leveraged buyout firm Forstmann Little, is
sitting with $500 million in equity capital and $2.5 billion in
subordinated debt capital, and he can leverage these amounts to a total
of at least $7 billion. Morgan Stanley recently raised $500 million for
LBOs. The Blackstone Group has $600 million. Jerome Kohlberg, who left
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in June and from all appearances did it in
dissatisfaction at the kind of deals the firm was backing, is raising
$500 million. Carl Icahn has money: over $800 million lodged in the
treasury of TWA.
Yet there are reasons to believe that takeovers and LBOs are on the
wane. The biggest is the recent problems in the junk bond market -- or
the ''wampum'' market, as Ted Forstmann, no admirer, calls it. Some 30%
or more of the typical LBO is financed with high-interest junk bonds,
and in the panic the junk-bond market got powerfully difficult. At times
there was nearly zero liquidity in the junk market.
As a result, many junk bond investors weren't even trying to sell,
since they would have had to unload at unacceptable prices. Not
surprisingly, the upheaval in the market has chilled new issues of junk.
The only major deal done in the week of Black Monday was a $400-million
issue by SCI Television, an offspring of Storer Communications. To make
this deal fly, its sponsor, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, had to offer
interest rates that ranged up to 17.5%, 8.5 percentage points above
prime. Even then, Drexel Burnham couldn't sell the whole deal and had to
inventory some of the bonds itself.
The securities industry was having a bad year even before the crash.
One reason was the bond market slump in April, which produced more than
half a billion in trading losses. More fundamental, the industry's costs
have been growing much faster than revenues, and the need for
retrenchment was already obvious. With Black Monday came new losses of
$1 billion, including the hit to risk arbitrage departments.
Those losses were only partly cushioned by extra commissions on the
huge trading volume, which Michael Goldstein of Sanford Bernstein
estimates at $35 million a day through late October. The restructuring
that began at some investment banks late last year could become much
more draconian now. Windel B. Priem, head of the financial services
division at the executive recruiting firm of Korn/Ferry International,
says many firms will aim to cut expenses by 20% this year. Priem thinks
the axes will fall hardest on Wall Street's yuppies -- ''the guy who is
five years out of business school making $500,000, and all he's been
doing is carrying someone's briefcase.''
Unprofitable businesses will be eliminated altogether, as Salomon
Brothers did in early October when it fired 800 employees and abandoned
the municipal bond market. Investment banks may leave trading in
commercial paper and certificates of deposit largely to commercial
banks, which do the job at lower cost. In addition, Goldstein notes that
few profitable innovations are coming out of the investment bankers'
pipeline to replace the old businesses, adding that he cannot foresee
the firms ever returning to their profitability of the early 1980s, when
they earned pretax returns on equity of 50%.
Of all securities companies, the mutual fund managers probably
survived the crash in the best shape. When investors cashed out of, say,
a Fidelity equity fund, most moved their money only as far as the
nearest Fidelity money-market fund. Goldstein figures that 75% to 90% of
the stock-fund sellers stayed within a family of funds. Discount
brokers, on the other hand, were badly bruised. Among the hard hit was
Charles Schwab, which reported it suffered $22 million in losses during
the crash. The brokerage couldn't handle the load of trades and
telephone calls coming in as the market collapsed. Quips Schreyer of
Merrill Lynch, hardly a disinterested observer: ''People were running in
here last week begging us to charge them 50% higher commissions.''
HOW SAFE ARE THE INVESTORS?
Brokers
and customers are likely to squabble about what happened in the crash
for months. Trades that were lost (DKs, for don't knows, in the
industry's jargon) and questionable trades (QTs) exploded. At Merrill
Lynch, DKs and QTs were ten times normal. When two firms disagree about a
trade or the computers don't confirm it, the brokers have to go to the
floor and resolve the matter in person.
The NYSE says QTs on Black Monday totaled 3.4% of the 202,084
transactions. The usual percentage is half that. Joseph Arsenio II,
executive vice president of Birr Wilson Securities in San Francisco,
expects there will be thousands of complaints about trades executed at
prices other than what customers specified. ''It used to be the broker
was always wrong and ate the loss,'' says Arsenio. ''But given this
disaster, that attitude may turn around. Brokers can claim the crash was
an act of God.''
Some investors who held stock on margin complain that brokers sold
them out at a loss without giving them a chance to put up more money. A
group of Florida investors has sued Bear Stearns for $100 million,
claiming it did just that. Bear Stearns says the suit has no merit. For
all the turmoil, investors apparently need not worry about the safety of
their accounts. The Securities Investor Protection Corporation, or
SIPC, which insures brokerage accounts up to $500,000, is flush with
$390 million, a $500-million credit line, and a statutory right to
borrow $1 billion from the Treasury.
Only one firm that deals with the public -- a small outfit in Grand
Rapids, Michigan -- has collapsed in the crash. In Europe the growing
trend toward wider share ownership among individual investors probably
has suffered a major setback, though just how major will depend on the
ultimate extent of the market's slide. Since 1979, Margaret Thatcher's
privatization drive has wooed seven million new investors into stocks.
Some four million French investors, most first-timers, have snapped up
the Chirac government's sales of more than $8 billion of shares in ten
state- owned companies over the past year.
At a minimum, as David Skinner, chairman of Edinburgh money managers
Martin Currie observes, ''these individual shareholders are going to be
reluctant to spread their wings for some time to come.'' Investors are
bound to be more reluctant everywhere, and that is potentially the
greatest cost of the panic of 1987. Vibrant stock markets perform a
vital function in generating capital for investment and innovation. By
offering broad opportunities for investors, they entice funds into the
market and reduce the cost of capital for corporations. Venture
capitalists back entrepreneurs in startup companies largely for the
chance of eventually going public and cashing in. That process has
brought us Apple Computer, Genentech, Immunex, and many others in recent
years. A weakened stock market makes for fewer benefits from the
initiative and creativity that are the miracle of a capitalist system.
REPORTER ASSOCIATES Christopher Knowlton and Sarah Smith Among the contributors to this special report on the stock market:
MARK ALPERT, ROSALIND KLEIN BERLIN, WELLINGTON CHU, DARIENNE L. DENNIS,
JACLYN FIERMAN, CATHERINE COMES HAIGHT, FREDERICK HIROSHI KATAYAMA,
RICHARD I. KIRKLAND JR., LOUIS KRAAR, COLIN LEINSTER, CAROL LOOMIS, TODD
MAY JR., SYLVIA NASAR, ROBERT E. NORTON, TERENCE P. PARE, EDWARD
PREWITT, ANTHONY RAMIREZ, WILTON WOODS, FORD S. WORTHY
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