Four at Four: What Would Milton Berle Do?

What would Milton Berle do? One of Uncle Miltie’s one-liners goes something like this: “The company accountant is shy and retiring. He’s shy a quarter of a million dollars. That’s why he’s retiring.” Whether that was original or “borrowed,” as many of the comic’s jabs were, he could be talking about any number of companies that are finding themselves short of the cash they’d like to have. Right now, a corporation has to navigate the economic slowing with the money it has, not with the money it wants to have, and that goes for General Motors as much as it does for General Electric, or any of the banks. Investors saw enough of what they wanted to like for Friday, as the broader market mostly finished higher, but with much of the earnings season still in the future, there remains much that is not known, only assumed. A total of... [read full story]