SantaCruz...
I said "neutral, at best, with a good deal of room for smoke and mirrors in the numbers." The report raised more questions in my mind than it answered, kind of like reading an Alan Greenspan paper on some obscure accounting theory. The most obviously ridiculous item was the use of a 9% profit assumption for its pension money, being lowered first to 8.5% then to 8%. This is not just a mental exercise, they are actually adding that money into current earnings as if they had really earned it, while in fact they are almost certainly losing money in their pension funds. We are talking billions of dollars of phoney "profits" - legal, yes, and many companies (GM, GE, TYC etc.) do the same thing to make their profits look better than they really are, but that makes the profits no less phoney.
On another note, talked with someone in the mortgage business tonight and she said that business has completely disappeared the past two days because of the effects on rates of the bond slump.
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