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To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (6382)	8/4/1998 8:21:00 PM
From: Kathleen capps	Respond to of 8002

From Bill Fleckenstein: As I see it .. I have spoken about this in the past but I feel the need to again address the inability of corporate executives to tell the truth and the gullibility of people managing money these days.ÿ Earl "The Pearl" Mason, CFO at Compaq (CPQ) is one of my favorites. Regular readers should recall my comments last fall about how the PC channel was full, but Compaq repeated almost daily that everything was hunky-dory. (Of course, this winter they had to fess up that earnings would be about a billion dollars light in the first six months of 1998.)ÿ Nowÿ this snake oil salesman is on a conference call with Montgomery Securities (and other firms) telling everybody once again that business is wonderful. Did everyone get a frontal lobotomy? Although he is beating the drums about the state of PC land, there are no facts to support him. Yesterday, Vanstar Corp. (VST), a corporate reseller (and a good barometer of the PC market in general), pre-announced yet again.ÿ Today, SCI Systems (SCI), a PC assembler, said the inventory correction is not over. I could go on with data points, but more important than these examples is that a guy who had no compunction about lying in the past is doing it again--and people want to believe him. It just goes to show you the damage that has been done has not shaken investor psychology; they will believe Earl Mason even when faced with something as obvious as the debacle taking place in the PC vendor business. Down the road people will look back and wonder why they continued to believe these corporate managers.ÿ Earl the Pearl is not alone, he is simply one of the more egregious and visible examples.