1. American Express's sleuths could not protect them against one of the biggest business frauds of all time — the Great .......... Oil Scandal, in which a subsidiary was conned into issuing warehouse receipts for the nonexistent oil of the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Company and commodities speculator Anthony De Angelis, who is now appealing his 20-year jail sentence.

2. Our model predicts that people will exhibit what we call the .......... effect: given bad or ambiguous news, they optimally choose to avoid collecting additional information, while given favorable news, individuals will seek out definitive information about the value of their portfolio.

3. Several top credit card issuers now slap penalty rates just shy of 30% on customers, including some who have made a single slip or even pay their bills on time; these modern-day versions of loan .......... won't endanger your kneecaps, but they may push you into bankruptcy court.

4. The U.S. Department of Labor enforces several major laws that directly protect .......... blowers or have provisions to shield employees from retaliation, for reporting violations of the laws, refusing to engage in any action made unlawful by the laws, or participating in any proceedings under the laws.

5. In the case of the WorldCom-Sprint combination, the FTC charged that the merger would have increased concentration in long- distance telecommunications and created .......... to entry that would have excluded competitors, such as the Baby Bells that lobbied hard against the merger.

6. The Canadian dollar, also known as the 'loonie' for the beautiful bird on its one-dollar coins, has long been the weak .......... to the U.S. dollar; oh, how nice it is for Yanks to go shopping in Canada — but maybe not for much longer, because the loonie is in a stealth rally.

7. .......... trading is a trading strategy where you hold stock positions for a short duration of time, but longer than a day trade; positions can last anywhere from 2 to 30 days, and generally try to take advantage of short and mid-term movements in stock prices.

8. The Joint Bookrunners will endeavor to procure purchasers for the Offer Shares not subscribed for through the exercise of PARs during the exercise period by way of private placements in the Netherlands and elsewhere, at a price per .......... Share which is at least equal to the total of the Issue Price and any expenses relating to procuring such purchasers.

9. This paper develops a theoretical model to analyze a firm's incentives to preannounce its new products: we consider a two-period model where a single firm controls the market with one product in the first period and it introduces a new and better product in the second period, where a preannouncement .......... the sales of the old product in the first period.

10. After an aggressive run, the markets gave up some of their gains Thursday to profit .........., which was not unexpected.