Signed, Sealed and Delivered
What is the man who presided over the twilight of the Soviet Union doing to keep himself busy these days?
One answer appears to be signing envelopes for sale.
A St. Louis area company is marketing 1,000 autographed envelopes it says were recently signed by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and authorized by a Gorbachev foundation.
“He is immensely popular in the United States, and if he ever qualified, could possibly win elective office in this country. We are very honored to have him as one of our clients,” says the ad from Gateway Stamp Co.
The company is touting its $450 price for each envelope as a bargain, insisting that Gorbachev-signed items usually go for $1,200 to $3,500.
Tougher Love Needed
It could hardly have been worse timing for Institutional Investor.
The April issue of the magazine, which regularly chronicles developments on Wall Street, includes an article titled: “How GE’s Tough Love Saved Kidder.”
The article makes the case that the Wall Street firm Kidder, Peabody & Co. recovered from insider trading scandals in the 1980s to flourish under General Electric and its chairman, Jack Welch.
“Wall Street snickered when GE imposed its industrial-strength culture on its sub. Maybe more firms need such stern parents,” the magazine says in its table of contents.
It now appears Kidder needed a lot more than that.
Over the past two weeks, Kidder has disclosed a huge, embarrassing trading scandal in which it fired the head of its government-bond trading unit for using “phantom trades” to inflate Kidder’s income by $350 million and terminated another trader for hiding some $10 million in losses.
Convention Sighting
Proof that Los Angeles can still land a convention amid earthquakes and riots comes next month when the fourth annual UFO Expo West touches down on June 11 and 12.
Appropriately, the gathering is scheduled at the Hyatt Hotel next to Los Angeles International Airport, the city’s main landing site for identified flying objects.
Among the topics listed in a program guide for the meeting:
* A talk on the “monuments of Mars” and the “loss” last summer of NASA’s Mars Observer spacecraft.
* New developments in the “military alien agenda.”
* The role of UFOs in the Vietnam War.
* A speech on the ability of extraterrestrials “to manipulate time.”
Briefly . . .
A Kentucky company sells class rings from the “University of Hard Knocks.” . . . The Clinton-bashing publication Slick Times in San Diego is touting itself as Spy magazine’s heir apparent. . . . “Naturally a Stellar Performance” is the title of a forecasting conference scheduled this month in New York for “financial astrologers.”
