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Origins
of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing by Roger Lowenstein Rating: •• (Mildly
Recommended) |
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Pedantic Primer Readers
who expect the same talent shown in When
Genius Failed will come away disappointed after reading Roger Lowenstein’s
new offering, Origins
of the Crash. Lowenstein does a good job here as a chronicler, and
presents an entertaining tour by a talented guide, but there’s not much
insight and perspective. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 4, “Number
Games.” pp. 55-61: The standard for shareholder value was
set by Jack Welch. He came from Welch and his underlings collected
plenty of stock options, and few executives made more of their incentives
than GE’s did. In a ten-year stretch, Welch earned $400 million in salary,
bonuses, and options—an extraordinary fortune for a hired hand. Most
of it derived from the rise in GE’s stock. Over Welch’s entire two decades as
CEO, adjusting for later splits, GE’s shares rose from $1.20 to roughly $50.
How did Welch orchestrate such a phenomenal rise? First, he cashiered
businesses he deemed unattractive, even the division that made GE’s famed
toasters, and redeployed their capital into more profitable businesses, such
as broadcasting and financial services. Second, he demanded relentless improvement
in the quality and productivity of the businesses that he did keep. His
unceasing focus on profits helped to raise GE’s reported earnings eight
times over. But if GE’s earnings rose eight times,
why did its stock rise forty_two times over
the same span? Why were investors now willing to pay five times more for a
dollar of GE’s earnings than they had been in the past? That was what
analysts really meant by shareholder value—getting a higher value in the
stock market. And nobody did that better than Welch. The secret of GE’s perennially rising stock was not just the growth of its profits but the consistency of its growth. Through war, through recession, through market crashes, its bottom line kept growing. In fact, GE’s earnings from continuing operations rose a phenomenal one hundred quarters in a row. Investors gladly paid for that consistency. It saved them from sleepless nights, from having to analyze the company themselves. They could simply rely on Jack. Welch liked to talk about “stretch,” meaning imposing seemingly impossible targets on managers and getting them to deliver. He also talked about making growth consistent—”with no surprises for investors.” Of course, the businesses that GE managed had plenty of surprises. Every business does. Over the years, Kidder Peabody, GE’s brokerage unit, took a billion-dollar loss. GE Capital, its huge financial arm, suffered numerous hits to its portfolio. GE’s turbine business was ever riding up and down with the cycle of aircraft manufacturing. The list could go on and on. But you wouldn’t know it from GE’s
smoothly rising bottom line. GE was said to enter every quarter with a
specific profit goal in mind— and to do “everything in its power” to make the
number, regardless of whether its actual performance turned out to be better
or worse. The idea that a company has discretion over its reported
earnings might sound strange. Companies never announce earnings of “somewhere
between 50 cents and 60 cents a share”—they announce a single figure as
though it had been chiseled in stone and was beyond the power of management
to influence. But in fact, modern accounting is as much art as science, and one is allowed a great deal of discretion in deriving the earnings for any one quarter. To take a simple example, when should a company recognize revenue—when it ships a product to a store or when the product is sold? For that matter, when is it sold—when the customer orders or when he pays? And if the customer buys on credit, when should the retailer conclude that the loan is bad—and if so, how much of the receivable should be written off? These and a hundred similar issues yield to judgment, not to an absolute answer. This doesn’t mean that anything goes.
The object of accounting remains to present a true economic picture of the
underlying business and to permit useful comparisons of earnings from year to
year and from company to company. Auditors may honestly differ, but if a
product is stacking up in the warehouse, the numbers ought to reflect it.
Otherwise, disclosure is worse than meaningless—it’s misleading. Unfortunately, as corporate activities
became more complex, the range over which auditors could invoke their
discretion widened. Stephen Key, an accountant and later the chief financial
officer at both ConAgra and Textron, recalls that when he entered accounting,
in 1968, it was possible to read the entire rulebook in a day. At recent
count, however, the rulebook had grown to 4,750 pages. “When you have 4,750
pages,” Key explained, “you start salami slicing. The rules become a
cookbook.” One way GE used the cookbook was to
adjust the reserves that GE Capital maintained against problem loans, adding
to the reserves in strong quarters so as to save income for a rainy day and
reducing them in weak quarters, when the income was “needed.” GE Capital was
so complex it was considered a black box to outsiders, even those who were
financial experts. In any given quarter, depending on the assumptions it made
about its multitudinous assets, loans, and derivative deals, GE Capital could
report almost whatever earnings number it pleased. Naturally, bad news could not be put off forever. But whenever GE suffered a major loss—say, from a restructuring—in one part of the empire, Welch inevitably found an unusual gain in another part. And these offsetting items always seemed to occur in the same quarter. For instance, in 1999, GE booked a huge paper profit from selling assets to its Internet baby, NBCi. Instead of reporting the extra profit, GE used the occasion to add to reserves, giving it a cushion to draw on in the future. The following year, GE Capital took a $200 million charge when one of its borrowers, Montgomery Ward, filed for bankruptcy. GE offset the loss by selling part of its stake in the broker PaineWebber. The size of these onetime items could be substantial. None of these maneuvers was illegal,
and any of them might have been adopted for the right reasons. But in the
aggregate, they helped to depict a business that was inherently rife with the
normal business fluctuations as preternaturally smooth. It suggested that
when Welch’s efforts to win were insufficient, he ordered his managers to
prettify the scoreboard, much to the betterment of his stock options. Moreover, Welch, like other CEOs, used
the pension plan to significantly inflate reported income. In an economic
sense, pension plans are a black hole. By law, once money goes into a plan it
can never be used for the benefit of stockholders. Nonetheless, the plans can
be used to create an appearance that is favorable to the stock. When
pensions earn a surplus, the parent company can book a credit to its
earnings, the size of which is highly dependent on management’s assumptions.
At GE, which relied on such adjustments to keep its earnings streak going,
about 10 percent of the profit reported to Wall Street was actually money
safely locked in the pension plan that neither Wall Street nor shareholders
could ever touch. Robert Friedman, a certified public accountant with the rating agency Standard & Poor’s, deconstructed GE’s earnings by stripping out gains from its pension plan, adding a tiny charge for stock options, and netting out the gains and losses from unusual items. The result was what Friedman termed core earnings. As you would expect, core earnings were a lot lower than reported earnings—over six years, anywhere from 1 percent to 20 percent lower. They also grew at a slower rate. Most interesting, perhaps, is that GE’s core earnings didn’t grow smoothly at all. One year they grew 39 percent. Another year they fell 4 percent; in another, 8 percent.’ This is not as desirable as a steadily rising slope—it just happens to be how business in the real world works. People do not increase their consumption of every product and service by identical increments in each twelve-month interval. Friedman didn’t publish his findings
until after GE’s shares (as well as the market generally) had lost their
luster, but the thrust of his argument was well known before. In 1998, SEC
chairman Levitt gave an impassioned speech at the
Stern School of Business at Almost unnoticed, executives who played number games became less candid with their investors. Their moral basis was undermined. Executives who consistently relied on accounting contrivances to sugarcoat their results came to respect the process less, and ultimately. they respected the shareholders less. At times, their contempt was plain. Al Dunlap, the cost-cutting executive at American Can, Scott Paper, and Sunbeam, glorified his supposed concern for shareholders in a best-selling book, Mean Business: “The most important person in any company is the shareholder. I’m not talking here about Wall Street fat cats. Working people and retired men and women have entrusted us with their 40l(k)s and pension plans for their children’s college tuition and their own long-term security.” While his concern for pensioners, university students, and other investors seemed touching, at Sunbeam, an appliance maker, Dunlap coldly betrayed them. According to an SEC complaint, the “revenue growth” that Dunlap reported to investors was actually achieved by “stuffing the channel,” meaning that he was secretly offering huge discounts to get dead inventory out the door. He also established phony “cookie jar” reserves to inflate profits. Sunbeam tiled for bankruptcy in 2001, and the shareholders were wiped out. More commonly, accounting artifice
encouraged, if not outright fabrications, a more casual relationship with
the truth. Corporate disclosures—which, it bears repeating, are the heart of
IBM was asked by various news
organizations about its practice of lumping onetime asset sales with
administrative expenses, which had the effect of making it appear as though
its costs, which Wall Street watched closely, were lower than they were. The
computer giant replied that its accounting was “within the letter of accepted
industry practice” and was “fully compliant with regulatory standards.” One
wants to groan. What dedicated employee would defend a misleading entry by
telling the owner that he was “fully compliant” with government standards?
The more it played the game of touching up the numbers, the more IBM forgot
what shareholders were—owners who deserved its complete candor. And it was
hardly alone. It
may be that we are in a period of time still too close to the bubble to have
insight and perspective. Lowenstein presents a readable and comprehensive
story in Origins
of the Crash, but readers looking for deeper insight will have to wait
for another book. Steve
Hopkins, March 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Origins
of the Crash.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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