The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Grasso's Clipping Payback's a ... Spitzer

1. The Richard Don't Always Get Richer

Dick Grasso says he looks forward to his day in court. We're not so sure he should.

Grasso, the former chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, was responding to a lawsuit filed Monday by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Among other allegations in the civil suit, Spitzer accuses that Grasso was wildly overpaid, in violation of New York's Not-for-Profit Law, that directors were misled about the size of Grasso's pay package, and that Grasso's dual role as a regulator and an NYSE employee created a conflict of interest -- an incentive that gave NYSE board members incentive to overpay him, lest they fall on his bad side.

Breaking a long silence, Grasso fought back in a lengthy opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday. Maybe it was a tight deadline he was working under, but not everything Grasso wrote made sense.

Like this:

"Mr. Spitzer charges that the Board was somehow misled or uninformed -- even though it was the Board that approved each of my contracts that set forth exactly how I would be compensated and it was the Board that approved my compensation every year."

Uh, this may seem like an obvious point, Dick, but you can be on an organization's board and be misled. If you don't believe me, there are a bunch of former Tyco (TYC Quote), Enron and WorldCom directors I'd love to introduce you to.

But the funniest aspect of Grasso's defense is that the board knew what it was getting into. "The men and women who set my compensation knew exactly what they were doing," he writes. The board, he says, had "eyes open to every dollar I had earned and been awarded."

Eyes open, maybe. But we at the lab doubt that they, or any other MBA on Wall Street, could have figured out exactly what Grasso had earned.

See, we leafed through some of the relevant documents last year, and refreshed our memories this week. But Grasso's compensation is still a mess to us. There's the Incentive Compensation Plan, the Long Term Incentive Plan, the Capital Accumulation Plan, the Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan, and the Supplemental Executive Savings Plan. There are the vesting dates, the Comparator Group, the Chairman's Award, and the bit about how the incremental $1 million ICP could result in a $6.8 million boost to SERP. Yeah, right.

If anything, the presentations of Grasso's pay seem designed to sow confusion, not clarify.

So if you ask us, we're not so sure that Grasso's name will be cleared in a court of law. No matter how much money he ends up holding onto, we suspect that the more the murky details of Grasso's pay come to light, the more his reputation will be tarnished, not varnished.

2. To Email BB&T or Not to Email BB&T

Imagine you've decided you don't want to get any speeding tickets. Which of the following strategies should you employ?

1. Be sure to drive no faster than the posted speed limit.

2. Lock your car in the garage and never drive again.

Well, if you chose answer No. 2, it appears you have a future at the financial services firm BB&T (BBT Quote).

Email Emissions Reduced Don't hit send

See, according to a source inside the North Carolina-based operator of banks and brokerages, some top executives at the firm -- for example, the president and chief investment officer of BB&T Asset Management -- aren't permitted to send any email. Receive email, yes, but send it, no.

We don't know what BB&T's reasoning might be here, but we suspect the alleged restrictions have something to do with a desire to ensure that top-level executives never end up sending emails that might result in embarrassment for the firm and/or litigation -- say, something on par with ex-Credit Suisse First Boston banker Frank Quattrone's now-infamous "clean up those files" email.

A BB&T spokeswoman said the only executive who would be able to comment on the reported restrictions was on vacation.

"It makes you wonder why they would implement such a policy," writes our source, who requested anonymity in the hopes of not getting fired. "Is it because they figure they have something to hide? Or do they have a lack of confidence in the brains of their executives that they must try to save them from incriminating themselves?"

We don't have the answer to that. But we know the people who do: some top executives at BB&T. If you'd like to shed some light here, send us an email. From your home account, if necessary.