Tradecraft “dangerous to financial democracy,” reviewers say

Sir:

We are writing this missive to you in grave and united protest regarding your new book Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing. Not only are your conclusions factually inaccurate, but some of the allegations made in your book are libelous, defamatory, fractious, and patently dangerous to financial democracy.

Your book claims that the officers of public companies are mountebanks and charlatans bent on gaming financial statements, riding the low roads to the gold-paneled safe deposit boxes of corporate boardrooms on the bending backs of the poor old worker hacks they employ. Nothing could be further from the truth. When we were offered a median amount of $50 million in additional stock options and equity compensation at the end of this fiscal year, not a one of us agreed without the most serious introspection and deliberation. We thought about it for many minutes. Some of us spent the better part of an hour on the matter. And, while we entertained the thought of refusing the packages, we only accepted them under the most extraordinary sense of responsibility to our shareholders. Self-denial, and only self-denial – not the Neronian excesses you seem fond of alluding to in your book – induced us to accede to these utterly well-merited compensation arrangements, which must surely be of the most minute consequence in the face of the profits our respective firms make. In fact, one of our firm’s stocks has actually broken even since we were appointed CEO. Several more are only slightly (5-35%) below where they were when we assumed leadership.

One of the most serious allegations in your monograph is an alarum for greater transparency in corporate financial statements. Tell me, Mr. Redmond – what good does it do to educate someone who doesn’t want to be educated? Why tell a man that his wife is cheating on him, even if she is? Why tell a 300-pound man he should stop eating so much or he’ll get heart disease? And why, why, why on earth should anyone ever tell investors that, in their own interests, sometimes our accounting teams need to “get surgical” with our financial reporting and make sure our “Miss Corporate” contestants have enough mascara for the judges – our auditors? We urge you, Mr. Redmond, to listen to the voice of reason, and accept the reality of the new financial reporting. It’s here to stay – and so are we!

Sincerely, The architects of every financial and accounting scandal in US history