There was a time when customers had few alternatives, so they tolerated the chain's limited stock, exorbitant late fees (Blockbuster collected about half a billion dollars a year in late fees), and absence of good advice about what to watch.
More recently, the investment fad was to justify exorbitant prices of technology stocks based, in part, on a litany of so-called nonfinancial metrics.
According to the lore, Mr. Market is a manic-depressive investor who one day will make exorbitant bids for the stocks you own and then turn tail the next and offer to sell at incredibly low prices.
According to a huge investigation revealed this week by American regulators, it paid brokers "exorbitant" commissions to push its stock while having little, it seems, in the way of operations.The pitch on its website certainly caught the Zeitgeist: "you determine the value of your shares, not the market".
Since these deals will be executed in stock, not cash, the exorbitant price of digital companies will make them natural predators, eyeing traditional companies for dinner.
This was a period in financial history when Japanese banks would finance the most marginal real estate speculator; land prices, and stock prices with them, climbed to exorbitant levels.
All of these stocks have misleading earnings paired with exorbitant valuations.
After all, it was Spitzer who, as state attorney general and self-appointed "Sheriff of Wall Street," went after corruption and greed in the finance industry, exposing investment bank stock inflation, securities fraud, predatory lending practices, exorbitant executive compensation and illegal late trading and market timing perpetrated by hedge funds and mutual fund companies.
Spitzer used the term in congressional testimony Nov. 4, in which he called for asset management firms to contractually promise to end the exorbitant premiums they traditionally charge mutual funds to pick stocks and begin charging them no more than pension funds pay for the same services.
Mr. Hewlett and his supporters argued that the price for Compaq -- $25 billion in stock when the deal was announced last fall -- was exorbitant and that becoming bigger would not make Hewlett-Packard stronger.
