Restating the Obvious

Those execs are worth every penny

Not any more. According to this Bloomberg report, insider purchases are now being taken as indications that a company is in trouble. For example:

"The S&P 500 lost 6.2 percent last week, dragged down in part by a 14 percent plunge in Best Buy Co., the largest U.S. electronics retailer. The Richfield, Minnesota-based company said last week that profit and sales will fall more than analysts forecast. Founder Richard Schulze bought 1.76 million shares three weeks before the announcement. The purchases were his first in at least five years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg."

In the late '20s, when everybody was going to be rich without working, newspaper reporters treated business executives like demigods. Sort of like they do Nobel Prize-winners today. Their opinions were solicited not just about business but about everything: Prohibition, hemlines, you name it.

After '29, the advice and opinions of business executives were at a deep discount. Recall how America laughed when Engine Charlie Wilson, late of GM and at the time Secretary of Defense, said that what's good for GM is good for America.

He may not have been as dumb as present-day GM honchos. The rest of his remark was that what was good for America was good for GM.

He was wrong, but as platitudes go, it was harmless and deserved forgetting.

Anyhow, my point is that business execs were figures of fun and derision.

It took the best part of 70 years for them to get back respect, and now they've thrown it away again.

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