The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

4. Whole Foods Fight

Whole Foods (WFMI) is turning the tables.

The Austin, Texas, organic grocer has been up to its ears in investigations. The Federal Trade Commission has been trying to block Whole Foods' attempt to purchase rival Wild Oats(OATS), and the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into CEO John Mackey's penchant for pseudonymous message board postings.

But Whole Foods can play sleuth too. The company said late Tuesday it is "investigating the apparent improper release by the Federal Trade Commission of confidential proprietary business information."

The FTC, of course, is seeking an injunction blocking the $565 million Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger. FTC lawyers filed some electronic documents Tuesday with the federal courts in Washington. Typically, government court filings in antitrust cases protect confidential business information by blacking out sensitive words and sentences.

But in this case, The Associated Press reported, "words intended to be redacted were actually just electronically shaded black." In the FTC documents, AP added, "words could be searched, copied, pasted and read in versions downloaded from court computer servers."

The FTC quickly posted a new version with the information properly redacted. But by then, the AP had already looked through the unredacted documents.

The AP reported, among other things, that Whole Foods was considering closing 30 Wild Oats stores. Whole Foods disavowed that number Tuesday, claiming somewhat incredibly that it can't made any "final" decisions till the deal closes.

Of course, Mackey wrote on his blog earlier this summer that Whole Foods would "be as transparent as possible" in its dealings with the FTC.

As usual, Whole Foods' motives are all too easy to see.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 85. Late Thursday, a judge refused the FTC's injunction request.