The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Only the Lord Is Perfect

Sallie Mae(SLM Quote) CEO Albert L. Lord plumbed the deepest depths of dumb this week. Before Wednesday's stunning performance, we had last seen Lord busily casting blame for the troubled student-loan maker's crimped earnings report (a net loss of $344 million vs. a profit of $263 million a year earlier) on the distraction of buyout talk.

All the chatter made him take his eye off the ball to the tune of a half-billion-dollar profit swing. Don't you hate when that happens? "It's clear that the deal distractions are significant," he said back then, apparently straight-faced. "They cost us earnings momentum."

Well, if it's possible to go from dumb to dumber, guess what? The good Lord did it. Apparently, Lord had to sell 1.2 million shares of his company stock recently, more than 90% of his total stake. Why? We learned this week that it was most probably caused by the usurious margin gods frowning on him. That's right, he got a margin call. And I thought those were just for the little people.

"The stock sale has been painful and was dictated by the specific terms of my securities account," he admitted in a statement that was painful and somewhat puzzling to read. On that alone, Lord qualified for inclusion on the dumbest, but he was not content to rest. Instead, he broke new ground.

Generality is the enemy of both art and conference calls with analysts, and Lord's performance on a call that was intended to soothe the markets defined general, non-specific and outright elusive. Rather than comfort the throngs, this conference call spooked the stock market.

And that was before the curses and threats. Referring to the arrival of nerdy analysts at a coming meeting, Lord said, "I can assure you, you will be going through a metal detector." And as the call ended, he said: "There's no questions. Let's get the **** out of here."

Dumb-o-Meter Score: A Perfect 100. Never before given out by this column, but what other number could aptly represent the drama of this display? Even a 99 would have failed to do full justice to the Lord's work.