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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (68681)	8/23/2006 4:56:21 PM
From: shades	Respond to of 110194

Holmes and Watson (Calculated - they have had Dr. Doom on an awful lot lately - I can recall 3 times in the past month - why the sudden urgency to have a doomsayer on all of a sudden? - like ann coulter coming on - it makes no sense!!) A 1999 Doomsayer geocities.com What the Securities & Exchange Commission says... Quality Information: The Lifeblood of Our Markets - October 18, 1999. SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt. "A little over a year ago, I voiced concerns over a gradual, but perceptible, erosion in the quality of financial reporting. The motivation to satisfy Wall Street earnings expectations was beginning to override long established precepts of financial reporting and ethical restraint. A culture of gamesmanship over the numbers was not only emerging, but weaving itself into the fabric of accepted conduct...A gamesmanship that says it's okay to bend the rules, tweak the numbers, and let small, but obvious and important discrepancies slide; a gamesmanship that tells managers it's fine to cut corners and look the other way to boost the stock price; where companies bend to the desires and pressures of Wall Street analysts rather than to the reality of numbers; where auditors are pressured not to rock the boat; and a gamesmanship that focuses exclusively on short-term numbers rather than long-term performance...I can only point to what I see as a web of dysfunctional relationships; where analysts develop models to gauge a company's earnings but rely heavily on a company's guidance; where companies' reported results are tailored more for the benefit of consensus estimates than to the reality of the ups and downs of business; where companies work to lower expectations when they fully expect they'll beat the estimates; and where the analyst attempts to walk the tightrope of fairly assessing a company's performance without upsetting his firm's investment banking relationships."