The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America - Hardcover

Berenson, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375508805 ISBN 13: 9780375508806

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2003

Synopsis

In this analysis of what went wrong in corporate America, Alex Berenson, a financial investigative reporter for The New York Times, examines the common thread connecting Enron, WorldCom, Halliburton, Computer Associates, Tyco, and other recent corporate scandals: the cult of the number.
Every three months, 14,000 publicly traded companies report sales and profits to their shareholders. Nothing is more important in these quarterly announcements than earnings per share, the lodestar that investors - and these days that's most of us - use to judge the health of corporate America. Earnings per share is the number for which all other numbers are sacrificed. It is the distilled truth of a company's health.
Too bad it's often a lie.
The Number provides a comprehensive overview of how Wall Street and corporate America lost their way during the great bull market that began in 1982. With fresh insight, wit, and a broad historical perspective, Berenson puts the accounting fraud of the past three years in context, describing how decades of lax standards and shady practices contributed to our current economic troubles.
The Number offers a unified vision of how today's accounting scandals reflect a broader system failure. As long as investors remain too focused on the number, companies will find ways to manipulate it. Alex Berenson gives anyone who has ever invested in - or worked for - a public company the tools necessary to see beyond the cult of the number, understand accounting and its limits, and recognize patterns that can lead to fraud. After two decades of stock market hype, The Number offers a welcome dose of truth about the way Wall Street and corporate America really work.

About this title

Review

"Alex Berenson, a whip-smart New York Times business reporter, is [a] wisecracking play-by-play commentator. In The Number, he offers a compelling account of how many large-number corporations went astray in the late 1990s. . . . Berenson knows this material cold, and he has a way with a phrase."
--The Washington Post

"Berenson's book is about far more than one financial concept or dictionary definition. It is a well-written, informative, fact-filled review of how we got into this mess. More, it's the sort of book those of us who plan to be around the financial-services industry for a long time can take down from our bookshelves years from now, during the next bubble, and say to the younger folks, 'Let me tell you something, this has happened before.'"
--The Mercury News

"If you're still trying to get a handle on what happened in the stock market for the last five years, [The Number] serves as a concise and readablecrash course."
--The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Alex Berenson graduated from Yale University in 1994, with degrees in history and economics. After working at The Denver Post and TheStreet.com, he joined The New York Times in 1999 as a business reporter specializing in financial investigative reporting. He has three times been named one of the top thirty business reporters under the age of thirty. He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375508805
• ISBN 13: 9780375508806
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 274