The number
Examines how companies have put too much emphasis on "the number," companies' quarterly earnings, and lost track of their true purpose of building profititable businesses, which has led to accounting fraud and the recent corporate scandals.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2013–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There is a great book called “The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America” by Alex Berenson. In it he outlines various frauds and market calamities: WorldCom, Enron, 2008. He makes the point that earnings per share often times comes down to cents and a single cent of earnings can make a stock rocket or plummet. Thus there is often complicated and opaque financial gymnastics to adjust EPS to meet expectations. It’s a great read.
- As a layperson with no economic credentials, I’d recommend books with a bit of entertainment value, even if they may gloss over some details. It’s still important to understand the basic theory and mechanics of the financial markets, but it’s equally important to understand the human factors and politics involved, and some of these more narrative books are helpful in that regard.
I found The Big Short both entertaining and enlightening on the 2008 crash, a while back I also read “The Number” by Alex Berenson, which focuses more on corporate equities and the rise of earnings per share as a driving metric.. I did also read about half of an older book called “Secrets of the Temple”, which gives a history of how Paul Volcker handled the inflation crisis of the 80s. That was more dense but really helped solidify my understanding of the Fed. I’ve also recently started “Random Walk through Wall Street”, which again is mostly equities-focused but so far seems to give a balanced take on the financial and human factors.
As far as explaining the most recent crisis, I’ve found this blog [0] to be the most informative, approachable and somewhat entertaining. Very clear explanation of what exactly the BTFP program is doing, with a healthy amount of speculation about how it could be abused and potential effects of that. Disclaimer that it’s written by a crypto researcher, but there’s very little content about crypto.
- Isn't this why Sarbanes-Oxley was introduced to begin with? Auditors getting too cozy with the companies they are meant to be impartially auditing, because most of their revenue actually comes from consulting.
The book The Number talks about this quite a bit: https://www.amazon.com/Number-Quarterly-Earnings-Corrupted-C...
- There are quite a few people who hold exactly that opinion. For instance, check out Alex Berenson's The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America, or read any "alternative" financial blog, and this line of reasoning might start to make at least some sense.
