Truth in lending...

...many corporations have notoriously inflated their earnings reports - and not just Enron. Quite legitimately, and with the blessings of the accounting industry, companies exclude many big expense items from their operating statements and may include revenues that should be left out. Exclusions like employee stock option expenses can be huge. At the same time, including estimated earnings from future investments of pension plan assets is only an estimate, and cannot be called reliable. Standard & Poor's has devised a method for making adjustments to arrive at a company's core earnings. Those are the earnings from the primary business of the company, and anything reported should be recurring.

The adjustments aren't small. For example, in 2002,.... That year, the two largest core earnings adjustments were made by Citicorp ($13.7 billion in adjustments) and General Electric ($11.2 billion in adjustments). (GE Capital and Credit Cards?).

Quoted from "the Demise of the Dollar... and why it's great for your investments" by Addison Wiggin, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2005.

This is a must read for everyone.

Enjoy.

Eliminate Credit Card Debt... Let me show you how to pay off all your credit card debt using the same money the bank used to fund your account! One Day I Woke Up and Found Myself $65,276 In Debt From Credit Cards... Now I'm Debt Free! You can be too - In two weeks or less!