The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Backdating to the Future at Adelphia

This week's nugget from the Adelphia Communications fraud and conspiracy trial: A former employee at the company -- a treasury supervisor who admits concocting a back-dated document and giving it to the company's auditors -- says he didn't do it to be deceptive.

"I knew the transactions had not happened, but I did not intend to mislead anybody," the Associated Press quotes James Helms as saying.

Instead, said Helms, he helped create phony bank documents to illustrate the movement of debt, acccording to the Associated Press and The Potter Leader-Enterprise. ...