Tumbling Tyco Finds a Growth Goal It Can't Manage

Has Tyco (TYC Quote) lost its game of chicken at the wheel?

Tyco, a giant electronics and health care conglomerate, dropped 8.3%, or $4.35, to $48.05 Tuesday after it beat analysts' first-quarter earnings expectations by a penny but warned second-quarter profits would fall short of the mark.

This year hasn't been very good to Tyco's stock. So far in 2002 it has slipped 19.8%, in part due to a somewhat obscure newsletter's suggestion that the Securities and Exchange Commission was about to take a fresh look at the company. Also contributing to the decline has been persistent chatter that a writer (let's call him Alex Berenson) at a major paper (let's call it The New York Times) was about to put out a story about how Tyco's accounting practices were less than pristine. ...