The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Turning Over a New Chief

Once again, the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab plunges into an area of study where few other social scientists dare to dabble: the collective wisdom of press releases.

It all started Wednesday when we read a press release from DirecTV Latin America, part-owned by DirecTV parent Hughes Electronics (GMH Quote). In the release, the struggling DirecTV LatAm disclosed several measures it was taking to salvage its precarious financial position. But the one that caught our eye was the naming of one Michael A. Feder as the company's chief restructuring officer.

Chief restructuring officer! That's a new one, we thought. And a sign of the times, too. Among your so-called C-level positions, you have your classic chief executive officer, chief operating officer and chief financial officer. But as we learned only Tuesday from a Wall Street Journal article, in the 1990s, companies rushed to appoint "chief knowledge officers," only to dump them once times got hard. Just as the rise and fall of the chief knowledge officers seems to say something profound about American business, could the debut of the chief restructuring officer mean something profound as well?

Time to do some work, we thought. With the aid of Dow Jones Interactive, we started sifting through press release wires to see what's going on with all the chiefs.

Check the chart for some of our key research findings.

Officer! Officer! Frequency of mentions of lesser-known corporate chiefs

Source: Dow Jones News Retrieval

The first thing we learned was that the post of chief restructuring officer is not a new one. It first shows up in the archives in the summer of 1991, in the context of a reorganization of then-struggling Canadian firm Algoma Steel.

Then we got the idea of charting the rise and fall of different chiefs over the past five years -- specifically, counting the number of press releases each year that mention a chief whatever officer. We figure that press releases reflect some meaningful combination of what corporations think is important and what corporations think people think is important. In other words, they're a half-decent, deadline-friendly barometer for gauging what's important in the business world.