The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

4. 57 Channels and Nothing On

The declining quality of television programming has got Cisco (CSCO Quote) chief John Chambers down.

The San Jose, Calif., communications gear company disappointed Wall Street this week with a mixed fiscal first-quarter earnings report. The company beat analysts' expectations, but shares sold off Thursday after Cisco admitted that sales of routers to U.S. financial companies dropped from year-ago levels.

That's a worrisome trend, given the credit crunch that is sweeping banks and brokerages across the world. Just in the last week, Merrill Lynch (MER Quote), Morgan Stanley (MS Quote), AIG (AIG Quote) and the aforementioned Citigroup all have taken multibillion-dollar writedowns on their holdings of subprime-related securities.

But Chambers remains doggedly optimistic, saying that "issues of concern" haven't spread beyond the U.S. He expects global growth to continue to drive strong gains at Cisco.

This is hardly an unusual view. In fact, many commentators believe economic expansion overseas will fuel U.S export growth and help keep the nation from skidding into recession.

You'd never know anyone else held that view to listen to Chambers, though. In fact, all the supposed naysaying has driven the well-paid executive to give up his favorite TV show, if you can imagine.

"I have a favorite TV show in the morning that I run with," Chambers said on Wednesday's postclose earnings conference call. "I exercise on my exercise machine, but they were so pessimistic in terms of their guess in the number of economists that were predicting economic slowdown that I actually had to start running outside in order to stay in shape."

Apparently changing the channel wasn't an option.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 82. Chambers' reaction recalls his stance in the early days of this decade, just before the tech bubble collapsed, some people note.

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