Apple doesn’t want you to pay any attention to the man behind the backdating curtain. You know, the man named Steve Jobs. And the adoring business media—otherwise frothing with outrage over executive compensation and the backdating “scandal”—have pretty much danced liked dervishes to Apple’s spin. Thankfully we have the (newly minature) Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins to once again point out that Jobs is pretty much “a typical miscreant” when it comes to backdating. It isn’t that jobs wasn’t involved in scandalous backdating, it’s that most of this backdating business isn’t really so much of a scandal at all.
The markets have finally had their say about the wonderfully overblown backdating scandal. When Apple filed its latest mea culpa on Friday along with a board expression of confidence in Steve Jobs's leadership, the company's shares jumped four bucks. Message: The market doesn't give a hoot about backdating. It gives a hoot whether Mr. Jobs might be run out of his job.This ought to cast a light on whether the drop in market prices of companies in the backdating scandal reflects the shock and horror of investors at the details of backdating -- or shock and horror at the meal that trial lawyers, prosecutors and the media are making of companies caught up in this episode…
Backdating, let's recall, was simply an artifice to allow companies to issue "in the money" options (the terms of which were accurately reported to shareholders) without taking an accounting expense. That's all backdating is. Does it matter in the teensiest whether options are expensed? No, expensing has no probative value whatsoever for evaluating a company's shares or its compensation policies. Expensing creates a junk number, of zero analytical value.
A Typical Miscreant-II [Wall Street Journal]
Posted by BR, Jan 03, 2007 3:01PM
Let me correct the microcephalic idiot at the WSJ who penned the following nonsense: "Backdating was simply an artifice to allow companies to issue "in the money" options (the terms of which were accurately reported to shareholders) without taking an accounting expense."
That's horsehockey -- it is simply theft from the shareholders by management and insiders, plain and simple.
This isn't a case of bad disclosure or footnoting an expense -- its giving yourself in-the-money options while pretending they are ordinary options. (some call that stealing)
Jenkins is an apologist for a bunch of hooligans and criminals. He even had the temerity to bash "prosecutors" for enforcing the law.
Why are you so pro-criminal anti-shareholder? Have you really drank all that Kool-Aid?
Move to Uganda, you idiot.