BW Online--What the Nation's Leading Papers Said This Week, January 4, 1999

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ERIC HUBLER

JANUARY 4, 1999

What the Nation's Leading Papers Said This Week

Happy Y1.999K, everyone! Since the New Year is a good time to look ahead to the time when you'll look back and wish you had been smart enough to look ahead, let's start our weekly read of Sunday's business sections with this encouraging perusal of new options for retirement from The New York Times (free registration required). Not coincidentally, the author is yours truly.

This is also a natural time to think ahead to this time next year, when the Y2K bug will be gnawing its way through the chlorophyll of society. (Hey, coming up with metaphors ain't easy on Sunday morning!) Good news from The San Jose Mercury-News: PC users should experience only mild annoyances related to the bug, and Mac users almost none. That is, if they don't require food, energy, or money.

The Securities & Exchange Commission's requirement that companies publish their worst-case Y2K scenarios should comfort investors who believe we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Almost all companies plan to build confidence by openly discussing their Y2K problems, The Minneapolis Star Tribune says. A year ago, most were keeping mum.

Near Year's fell at an awkward time for yearend mutual-fund-review purposes: Many Sunday sections were "put to bed" on Thursday, and Thursday was, of course, the last trading day of 1998, meaning that any paper that published a wrapup this week either has a direct neuronal link to Michael Lipper, or fudged. Look for the lavish data smorgasbords next week. Until then, read The Washington Post's breezy markets essay and Boston Globe fund columnist Charles A. Jaffe's predictions for the coming year. He's writing more about trends in the fund industry than about stock performance, but the former can affect your returns just as can the latter.

The silver-tongued devil who sells you stocks has to have a license to do it. So does the gal who highlights your hair. Why, then, do the people who build and inspect your most precious material possession -- your house -- get off without governmental oversight? That's what Marylanders may be asking themselves after reading The Baltimore Sun's piece on efforts, thus far unsuccessful, to regulate the homebuilding industry in that state. Like a warning not to expect too much, however, another item in The Sun shows how governmental efforts to improve citizens' lives can backfire. You would think a tax cut would be welcome news, but the one just enacted in the She-Crab State is so complicated that the money saved is likely to go into tax preparers' pockets, the paper says.

Another good idea on the housing front: "mutual self-help housing," pioneered by a former Franciscan monk, lets folks who can't afford a down payment buy a house in exchange for sweat equity. Taking inspiration from the Quakers, the program goes Habitat for Humanity one better, The Denver Rocky Mountain News reports.

The author of The Dallas Morning News' "Works In Progress" column invites us to check back in on several of the entrepreneurs she profiled last year. Let's do. I love stories about people who get rich doing things I've never thought of, and this column doesn't disappoint: If you laid all the tabletop fountains sold by Dean Sung end-to-end, we are assured, they'd stretch clear from Dallas to Waco. To put it in a way a non-Texan could understand: Sung sold $5 million worth of the little tinklers in '98.

Speaking of things I didn't think of but should have.... Investing in a small-cap index fund is an inherently silly idea, writes The Los Angeles Times' Paul J. Lim, because small companies are usually small for a reason. The moment they get successful and grow, they leave the index -- and, thus, your portfolio -- and move on up to someone else's. If you like indexing, stick to large-caps, Lim argues.

The weakness of "service journalism" of the TEN STOCKS TO BUY RIGHT NOW!!!!! variety is that it's often written and edited by people who neither know nor care whether their predictions make any sense. Embedded somewhere in the story, usually in a paragraph beginning "To be sure," you'll almost always find the precise opposite of what appears to be the author's argument. That's why I greatly admire this bracingly straightforward column from The Miami Herald's David Poppe explaining why Internet stocks will -- not might, but will -- crash.

When hit with a $5 late fee on your cable bill, what do you do? Probably curse for a few seconds -- if you even notice the charge -- and write the check. Well, Jerry Wood of Littleton, Colo., sued Tele-Communications Inc. -- in fact, he helped spawn a class action against the cable giant -- arguing, The Denver Post reports, that as long as your service stinks, don't expect mine to be any better. Late-fee lawsuits against cable companies are a national trend, the paper finds.

Would you entrust the maintenance of your business to a contractor whose initials are PMS? The federal government does: PM Services Inc. of St. Petersburg, Fla., makes a tidy profit tidying up at government and military facilities, The St. Petersburg Times reports.

We end this New Year's edition of Sunday's Business on a sad note: Kaboodle Hubler died of cancer this week. More accurately, he died of a lethal injection administered by a veterinarian who couldn't treat the cancer. So let's not tell his owner, my sister, about Newsday's business cover. It's about Long Island Veterinary Specialists, a 12,000-square-foot animal hospital that boasts technology worthy of a leading human hospital.

Eric Hubler covers health care for the Denver Post

EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT

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