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The story showed how investment banks silently set aside hot initial public stock offerings to the personal brokerage accounts of executives being wooed by the firms for corporate-finance businees -- and sell, or "spin" the shares for quick profits. The practice has been described as "black and white corporate bribery." Spinning helps explain why most investors have been denied a piece of the most lucrative part of the stock market pie in the 1990s, all at a time when more Americans had more in the market than ever.