Business news has become a joke
By Katherine Burton / Bloomberg News / July 4, 2002
NY— Stock markets tumbled as corporate scandals from Enron's shredding to WorldCom's phony bookkeeping wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in investments. The mood is grim, and Wall Street is laughing.
E-mails making the rounds of hedge-fund managers include these proposed new accounting acronyms:
For EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), now read Earnings Before I Tricked the Dumb Auditor.
CEO now stands for Chief Embezzlement Officer, while EPS, instead of earnings per share, means Eventual Prison Sentence.
Tyco International's market value plunged by $92 billion this year, and Dennis Kozlowski stepped down as chief executive just before he was indicted on tax-evasion charges.
A real news headline — Tyco Speaking to CEO Candidates — resulted in this e-mailed fantasy "interview":
Interviewer: "Have you ever been in jail?"
CEO Wannabe: "Not yet."
Interviewer: "How much is 2 plus 2?"
CEO Wannabe: "What do you want it to be?"
Interviewer: "When can you start?"
Wall Street brokers and analysts also are under attack for helping inflate the dot.com bubble that has now burst. They aren't immune from the blame going around. In May, Merrill Lynch agreed to pay a $100 million fine to settle New York State charges that it spun research to win and please clients.
In June, Arthur Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice, and both WorldCom and Xerox admitted they fabricated earnings. The worse the news, the quicker the jokes spread.
The Internet helps fan the black humor. "It's a field day for satirists," said Andrew Marlatt, who runs SatireWire.com, a Web site devoted to making light of newsworthy events.
"How often do you have so many egregious things happening at the same time?" he said.
Marlatt ran a piece about a band of roving chief executives who flee for the Mexican border, "plundering towns and villages along the way and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense."
"I can't explain why the world is suddenly interested in poking fun at business," he said. "Other than that everyone has lost millions of dollars."
People normally uninterested in business have been riveted by news that Martha Stewart, the housekeeping icon, is being investigated for insider trading. The tips allegedly came from her pal Sam Waksal, the ex-CEO of ImClone Systems, who has been indicted on insider-trading charges.
Corporate shenanigans have been fodder for "Saturday Night Live" and Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strip, where characters have trouble telling the business section from the crime page.
Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a biweekly newsletter, has moved beyond its coverage of bank loans, money-market funds and corporate bonds to take note of the scandal in cartoons.
"How are we quoting bail bonds?" shouts a broker to a colleague on a trading desk in one cartoon.
Said editor Jim Grant, who thinks up the punchlines: "There's no end of opportunities at this juncture." |
