dispatches from the new world of work

Vile Bile!
Dearly Deserved!

Wall Street Journal, 22 January 2008: "Our fourth-quarter results were severely impacted by ongoing dislocations in capital markets and the slowing economy," said Kenneth D. Lewis, [Bank of America] chairman and chief executive officer. "However, we are cautiously optimistic about 2008 ..."

TP translation: "We made total asses of ourselves, allowing ourselves to be conned by a bunch of out-of-touch Nobel-winning 'economists' with their 'portfolio-risk smoothing models.' Then, as inevitably happens amidst the madness of crowds of overpaid executives bent upon 'keeping up with the Joneses,' we were flattened by that silly old saw, 'That which goes up eventually comes down.' Wow, talk about 'What they didn't teach us at Harvard Business School'! Truth is, we all ought to be put in stocks where people can throw rotten tomatoes at us—they'll have lots of time to do that given expected unemployment #s that we have wittingly facilitated. Meanwhile, I wish the very best to Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide CEO & Subprime Principal Perp, as he ponders how to spend the $112,000,000 I'm helping him pocket, obtained by shafting hundreds of thousands of innocents using sales 'incentive' schemes that make the numbers racketeers on the streets look squeaky clean by comparison. As to my 'cautiously optimistic for 2008,' what the hell else do you expect me to say? If I told the truth, you'd string me up even higher. Okay, okay, you win, I'm an idiot, an overpaid clown, conned like some mark for Three-card Monte on 17th Street in lower Manhattan. But I'm a rich idiot; you know what they say, 'Only in America.' Glad I wasn't born in Russia—Putin would already have shipped me, and probably my family, to Siberia; I hear it's colder there than in Charlotte, though given the cocoon in which I live, soothed by the dulcet tones of my executives singing my praises to me, I actually haven't been out in real weather for years."

(For those of you who wish to share the above, including this morning's
opening 446 point drop of the Dow, Tom has created a short PowerPoint, "The Subprime Times.")

Tom Peters posted this on 01/22/08.

Comments

"Putin would already have shipped me, and probably my family, to Siberia"...prolly not...he would just as likely been a member of Putin's inner circle and been rewarded with a big bonus, a huge dacha, and one of those nifty cars with special privileges over all other traffic.

Posted by david foster at January 22, 2008 5:26 PM

WAHOOO! My wife works for Bank of America...doing penance...and they are an evil, mismanaged crowd of MBA's and Divas. If the region she works in was a hospital it would be shut down for bad practices. It scares me and her how the company has changed since Nations Bank took it over.

The employees did not get their yearly bonus...Countrywide's clown did and the CEO did, but the rank and file got jack.

Screw them!

Posted by Roger at January 22, 2008 8:08 PM

It depends on when you read the news how many points you saw as the high point of the loss (low point?). Tom says 446 in his post, and I saw something else when I linked it for him, but the final story is at the link below. The loss at one point was 464, but stocks closed only 128 points down:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120099783530906231.html?mod=special_coverage

Posted by cathy mosca at January 22, 2008 8:19 PM

446 v 464 is a simple case of morning dyslexiia!

Posted by tom peters at January 23, 2008 1:43 PM