Business buzzwords

The telecommunications giant, ....., is perhaps best known for a massive accounting scandal; its executives effectively fudged the company's accounting numbers, inflating the company's assets by around 12 billion dollars, and the swift bankruptcy that followed led to massive losses for investors.

A ..... is a high-strung portfolio manager who, looking for high returns, invests in very high-risk stock.

Fannie Mae's 15-year mortgage-backed securities and Bilbo Baggins's friends are called ......

The ..... Commission was formed in 1973 by private citizens of Japan, Europe (European Union countries), and North America (United States and Canada) to foster closer cooperation among these core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system.

In a number of ..... marketing cases, a company has approved an email campaign because the marketer promised that it would send only to people who opted in to receive stock announcements; then the company is surprised to learn that the so-called 'opt-in list' is just a standard bulkmailer's list of addresses scraped from Usenet and the Web.

In his book, 'The Logical Trader', author Mark Fisher discusses techniques for identifying potential market tops and bottoms; one, the '.....', has nothing to do with food, except that it was conceived over lunch where a number of traders were discussing market set-ups.

To many, perhaps most, observers of today's legal scene, a 'white .....' law firm is nothing more than a large, prominent firm serving a primarily corporate clientele; but those who entered the profession before the 1980s can remember a time when there were those firms and there were the Jewish firms, and the former worked to keep it that way.

An investor with a short horizon should buy stocks in ..... markets, thus chasing general trends; an investor with a long horizon should reduce her commitment to stocks in the same markets.

..... Comes Off Starbucks: Shares in Starbucks fell to their lowest level since late 2005 as investor concerns about slower sales and profit growth continued to chip away at the once highflying stock.

The good and bad of .....: Tax refunds may be welcome to most taxpayers, but technically speaking, it's not wise to give the government interest-free loans.