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

With a new Afterword by the author and a new Foreword by Mark Cuban In this commanding big-picture analysis of what went wrong in corporate America, Alex Berenson, a top financial investigative reporter forThe 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 investorsand these days, that's most of ususe 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. Alex Berenson'sThe Numberprovides a comprehensiv, brutally factual overview of how Wall Street and corporate America lost their way during the great bull market that began in 1982. With wit and a broad historical perspective, Berenson puts recent corporate accounting (or accountability) disasters in their proper context. He explains how the wheels came off the wagon, giving readers the information and analysis they need to understand Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Halliburton, and the rest of the corporate calamities of our times.

Alex Berenson graduated from Yale University in 1994, with degrees in history and economics. After working at <i>The Denver Post</i> and <i>TheStreet.com</i>, he joined <i>The New York Times</i> 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.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>