The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

At first glance, the Journal is right: chief knowledge officers are a bull-market phenomenon. But we at the Lab caution you that their dramatic rise and fall between 1998 and 2002 isn't quite so dramatic when you compare them to our control groups of CEOs, COOs and CFOs, all of which peaked in 2000. Since the number of press releases mentioning, say, chief executive officers rose and fell over that five-year span (going from 67,000 annually to 87,000, then ending at 64,000), we're assuming that some of the chief knowledge officer volatility is simply a function of corporate press office staffing levels.

More interesting to us is the fate of chief privacy officers, of which there were none in 1998 and only five in 1999 (actually, just one, but he starred in five different releases from his employer, the now-defunct AllAdvantage.com). The chief privacy officers hit their peak in 2001, a year after everyone else; perhaps because Internet privacy paranoia was a more powerful phenomenon than the collapse of companies that posed a conceivable consumer privacy threat.

But the most fascinating trend is that of our old pal, the chief restructuring officer. Chief restructuring officers show no signs of slinking away. For reasons you don't need to be a research scientist to figure out.

2. Can't Stop the Muzak

How much longer, we ask you, will it take to completely drain all meaning out of the music of our youth? To convert it into nothing more than a commoditized prop for commerce?

Oh, about five more days, at this rate.

As the Research Lab has already indicated, 2002 was an ignominious year along this front. The Clash's 1979 landmark London Calling sold Jaguars for Ford (F - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr). The Rolling Stones started hawking E*Trade (ET - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) IRAs on their concert tour.

And 2003 has hardly begun, but the alarming trend continues. Corporate music distributor Muzak announced last Friday it was supplying "custom music programming" to the Hard Rock Hotel at Universal Orlando -- specifically, to the "entranceway, lobby, pool and other common guest areas." Hard Rock Cafe International, by the way, is a subsidiary of the Rank Group (RANKY - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr).