1. .......... auction is characterized by its decreasing price mechanism: the auction starts at a relatively high price and repeatedly decreases the price until a bid is announced by one of the auction participants; the auction is then terminated and the bidder wins the auction.

2. .......... workers were your company's onetime peak performers who left your employ for advancement opportunities elsewhere, for more salary or other reasons; with the scarcity of Qualified workers, workplace demographics are putting pressure on companies to woo these former workers back.

3. .......... is the hobby of collecting scrip such as securities, documents and ephemera issued by firms and governments in the past; usually these securities have no value as financial claims, though they may have considerable value for their artistic merit or historical interest.

4. Futures traders frequently manipulated prices: from the end of the Civil War until 1879, .......... (control of enough of the available supply of a commodity to manipulate its price) allegedly occurred with varying success in wheat (1878/9), corn (1868), oats (1874), rye (1868) and pork (1868).

5. Each quarter, the NYSE publishes circuit .......... levels at 10 and 20-percent of the average value of the Dow from the prior month: if the market drops beyond these points, trading is stopped for a specified time based on the time of day when the drop occurred.

6. A .......... bond is a bond that is not denominated in yen and is issued in any market by a Japanese financial institution; this type of bond is often bought by Japanese institutional investors.

7. The investing method known as the .......... of the Dow, is simply to buy equal dollar amounts of the ten Dow stocks with the highest yield and hold them for one year; for the last 25 years, this canine approach has compounded at an annual rate of 18%, beating the market (15%) soundly.

8. The SEC has accused the former CFO of Lantronix Inc. of engaging in a scheme to overstate financial results for personal gain through artificially boosting sales by offering distributors special terms to induce them to purchase more product than they needed, which is called channel ..........

9. GM has terminated customer leases of the EV-1 high-tech vehicle and sent the cars to the crusher, and it has waged its .......... earth policy against a technological threat before: in the 1940s, it bought out the electric street car industry and burned all the cars so it could replace them with diesel buses.

10. The survivorship .......... problem has increased in recent years as mutual fund families try to bury poor performance; in 1998 alone, 387 stock and bond funds were merged out of existence, an increase of 43% over the previous year.