Jackson Hole query

[Brad DeLong]

>ah bollocks.  He ought to get off his high horse if that's what he 
>thinks.  All
>the necessary information to correct for proforma, stock options &c are out in
>the open, and anyone who has a mind to can prepare their own numbers to their
>own taste.  If they can't be bothered to do so and just take the reported
>numbers at face value, that's a) a problem of effort or rationality, not
>information and b) their own lookout.

The fact is that the Silicon Valley companies that grant the options 
think it is *very* important that the fully-diluted numbers stay in 
small print at the back, think it is *very* important that they be 
able to focus their press releases on "pro forma" numbers, and that 
GAAP not be improved.

I was somewhat slightly bemused at the conference by the fact that my 
usually laissez faire-loving ex-roommate Andrei Shleifer felt so very 
strongly that the past two decades had seen a substantial degradation 
in the quality of the information on which the marginal investor is 
acting, and that this was a problem that required government action 
to solve.

But at the moment I am even more bemused.

In the phrase "their own lookout" I hear the echo of _Atlas 
Shrugged_. The thought of Alan Greenspan being outflanked on the Ayn 
Randite (Randish? Randian? Randist?) right by Daniel Davies...


:-)

Brad DeLong