The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

3. The Sumner Wind

Viacom (VIA Quote) Chairman Sumner Redstone is trying to turn back the clock.

A mere two weeks after he parted ways with movie star Tom Cruise, Redstone shook up the New York media company again Tuesday. He canned Viacom CEO Tom Freston and rehired two former vice chairmen, Philippe Dauman and Tom Dooley. They had been running a private equity fund since their departure seven years ago.

Redstone promised that investors would see Viacom "moving ahead as entrepreneurially and as aggressively" as possible, particularly in digital media. New leadership will pave the way, he said.

"I could not be more pleased to be teaming up again with Philippe and Tom," Redstone said.

Wall Street was less pleased, sending Viacom shares down 8% over two days. Redstone called Dauman and Dooley "two of the most extraordinary executives I have ever known," but the selloff seemed to undermine Redstone's claim that it was Freston who had lost credibility.

After all, Freston isn't the first Viacom hard-charger to have overstayed his welcome with Redstone. Before Freston there was Mel Karmazin, who left two years ago muttering that Redstone would never retire. Before Karmazin, there was Frank Biondi.

Bizarrely enough, that's the very sequence Redstone was recalling when he cut Freston loose. Evidently Redstone views the 1996-1999 period -- back when Dauman and Dooley shared the executive suite with Redstone, in between the Biondi and Karmazin regimes -- as Viacom's greatest hit.

Indeed, Redstone's latest plan to revive Viacom ranges well beyond entrepreneurship and veers into the realm of wishful thinking.

"When Philippe and Tom Dooley and I were a team," Redstone told inquiring minds, according to a Thomson Financial conference call transcript, "our stock actually tripled."

Good luck pulling off that trick again.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 88. It seems some people are tired of Endless Sumner.