2004-07-15 Outlining the Causes of the Stock-Market Crash of 2000-2002

I know of no book that touches on so many subjects including:

-Retirement money moving into mutual funds

-LBOs creating pressure on CEOs to get their stock prices up

-Leveraging of public companies to improve stock price

-The rise of free market economics as a policy influence

-401(k) plans creating a chase for fast results

-CEO stock options rising through the roof

-Michael Jensen and Joel Stern providing arguments in favor of excessive payments to executives

-Rise of the CFO as a "profit engineer" to produce most of company earnings results

-Lack of e.p.s. hit for stock options

-CEO pay skyrockets in the absence of performance due to lax consultants and boards

-New stock options being granted after stocks drop

-Cozy boards that inappropriately keep CEOs in place

-Managed earnings (especially by GE and Coca-Cola)

-Reduced disclosure

-Special Purpose Vehicles (to keep losses and debt hidden from investors)

-Security analysts having conflicts of interest

-SEC didn't do enough

-Accounting firms have conflicts of interest

-Derivatives are too unregulated

-Too much money to Venture Capital funds

-IPO boom

-Pro forma earnings

-Overinvestment in telecommunications

-Unrealistic expectations for the Internet and Internet companies

-Fraud by Enron, WorldCom and others.

Mr. Lowenstein also goes on to describe the current reform efforts including Reg FD and the Sarbanes-Oxley legistlation, and finds that we have not really cured the problem. We will inevitably have another bubble and crash ahead. I agree with that view.

At bottom, Mr. Lowenstein understands very well that too much financial incentive for executives is bad for everyone. The temptation is simply too great to bend the line . . . or to cross way over it. The average compensation in major public companies is excessive now, so the ultimate cause of inappropriate behavior is still in place. As a consultant, I have repeatedly seen honorable people make lousy decisions when the size of their bonus and stock option potential was larger than they could deal with in an unemotional way.

The book's main weaknesses come in two areas. First, Mr. Lowenstein views from the problem as an outsider and gets almost all of his information from the media. As a result, he doesn't give you the real pulse of what was going wrong in the companies. It would have been helpful if he had contrasted the Enrons and WorldComs with companies that were led by executives who have done an outstanding job running their companies during the same years (while being exposed to the same temptations and conflicts) such as Michael Dell, Tom Golisano, James Morgan, Jake Gosa, Bob Swanson, and Bob Knutson.

Second, he is sometimes careless about details. Joel Stern's Economic Value Added (EVA) is described as "Equity Value Added." The Innovator's Dilemma by Professor Clayton Christensen is described as being a bad influence on Citicorp by discouraging executives from improving their existing operations (nothing could be further from the truth).

In the end, I was impressed by his understanding that feeding greed with unlimited incentives is a bad idea. That's the bottom line on this crash.

As I finished the book, I was left wondering how we can cure this tendency to provide too many financial incentives to do the wrong thing. Simply policing those who are provided with the incentives more closely will probably not work by itself.