The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

And how will the celebrities themselves feel about their Effective Deaths? Well, some of them, we dare suggest, won't even be aware of their Effective Demise. Others, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, might actually enjoy the privilege of attending their own Effective Funeral.

Of course, we'd need some safeguards to ensure that Effectively Dead folks don't try to use the publicity generated by their Effective Deaths to launch a career revival.

That would be in bad taste.

4. Operating Prophets

Oops! We almost forgot about the contest!

Last week, we asked readers if they could come up with a substitute for Operating Income Before Depreciation and Amortization, abbreviated as OIBDA, pronounced as "Oyb-dah."

Though more and more companies are using OIBDA as an important financial number (see last week's Dumb Things to learn why), nobody seems particularly happy about it.

So what measures, abbreviations and pronunciations did the research lab's correspondents offer in OIBDA's stead?

To get rid of the "Oy" sound implied by the OI in OIBDA, some folks want to just dump the "I." Randy Coker suggests calling OIBDA "OBDA," pronounced "oh-bee-dah." Mrunal "Micky" Jagirdar likes "Operating income eX-Depreciation and Amortization," or OxDa. Bruce Rosner reverses the usual order of "depreciation and amortization" to end up with Operating income Before Amortization and Depreciation, or OBAD.

Unfortunately, we can't imagine that any company would want to de-emphasize income by dropping the "I," so none of these cut it.

Other people like OIBDA, too, but said it should stand for something else. "Only Idiots Believe Dis Accounting," cries Paul Neumann.

More ideas, in order of general plausibility:

• Operating Income Before Amortization and Depreciation, or OIBAD -- Britt Fair, also Lawrence Herbert, also David Cist.

• OPerating INcome Before Amortization & Depreciation, or OPINBAD -- Scott Dietz.

• OPerating INcome WIth No Depreciation or Amortization, or OPINWINDA -- Jim C. Kelly.

• INcome before Depreciation, Interest, Taxes, and Extraordinary Miscellaneous Expenses, or INDITEME -- David Ryan.

• Earnings Arranged 'Round Whatever Analysts eXpect, or EARWAX -- Tim Dunbar. ("While not exactly grammatically correct," writes Dunbar, "EARWAX, much like many earnings announcements, will make you say, 'Huh?'")

• Operating Income Cleared of Depreciation Or Amortization, or OICDOA (pronounced "Oh, I see: D.O.A." -- Kelly Clark.

Finally, Shane Hoover writes that with EBITDA, OIBDA and other abbreviations, companies are edging toward simply excluding all costs. "You could just call it 'Revenues,'" he says.

"But that likely isn't catchy enough," continues Hoover. "Doesn't quite sound 'technical' enough." So he suggests Revenues -- Includes Performance Liked, Excludes Your [scatalogical noun deleted], or RIPLEYS for short. "Investors can simply choose to believe it ... or not."

Yes, all of these suggestions amused us. But none was the winner. The only expression/abbreviation combo we could conceive any CEO using on a conference call was Operating Income Less Depreciation and Amortization, or OILDA. As in "oil-dah." Sort of rolls off the tongue, we think.

Duplicate winning entries were submitted by Walter Scoggins and Manish I. Shah. Since we received Scoggins' first, he gets his choice of the three books we offered up as prizes, and Shah gets one of the leftovers. Some of you begged for a shot at our brand-new Yahoo! (YHOO) lunch pail, but we're saving that one for a future contest.

5. Band on the Enron

One of the tragedies at Enron, WorldCom, and all those other accounting casualties is that Everybody Knew It. Among numerous employees, it was an open secret, sometimes for years, that the accounting probably wasn't Generally Acceptable.

New proof this week came in the third interim report, released Monday, from Enron bankruptcy examiner Neal Batson. By 1998 -- three years before Enron fell apart -- accounting issues were enough of a topic of conversation inside Enron that someone actually wrote a humorous song about it. And it's possible, writes Batson, that the song was written in 1996; the only copy in his possession is difficult to read.

To save you readers the effort of tracking down the song yourself (it's in Appendix C, starting on page 30), the research lab is happy to reprint the lyrics to the piece, titled "Balance Sheet Blues."

We got Price Risk Management Assets
And Liabilities, too
We got Price Risk Management Assets
We got the Balance Sheet Blues

We got too much debt to be BB
Just can't find enough cash
We got too much debt to be BB
More prepaids will cause us to crash

They call us "innovators" (That's right, Rick)
We got to please the raters (That's right, Jeff)
Don't feed us to the 'gators (That's right, Cris)
We've got the balance sheet blues.

We got a relative outside the Beltway
They got enough crude to go around
If Don can make it do circles
It won't have to be found

We got some friends up in the Big Apple
They got enough cash to go round
If Claude can make it do circles
It won't have to be found.

The author of "Balance Sheet Blues" is unknown, as is the tune. But here's our message to the songwriter, whoever you are: If you'll step forward, the lab will give you the fame you deserve.

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