I just wanted to present some of the suggestions that Arianna Huffington outlines in her book, "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America." I personally believe that most of them would be good for us in the long run. 1. Treat stock options as the expenses they are. 2. Make bridging the Chinese wall between research analysts and investment bankers illegal. 3. Prohibit accounting firms from providing any consulting services while auditing a company's books. 4. Outlaw offshore tax havens, and in the meantime, bar companies that move their headquarters overseas from competing for government contracts. 5. Regulate the special purpose entities used for the complex, off-balance sheet transactions that were at the heart of the Enron debacle. 6. Strengthen whistle-blower protection and ensure that it sheilds all workers completely. 7. Begin to address the question of restitutionby repealing the provision in the Private Security Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that makes it extremely hard for investors to recover losses sustained through corporate fraud. 8. Strengthen the independance of corporate boards. 9. Drastically overhaul current accounting standards. 10. Outlaw accounting gimmicks - like "Monthly Income Preferred Shares" - that make it impossible for the public to have an accurate picture of a company's financial health. 11. Institute real pension reform. 12. Institute some basic lobbying reform. 13. Repeal the Financial Modernization Act - which ended the separation of banking functions created in the New Deal. 14. Stop the Bankruptcy Reform Act from becoming law. 15. End the ability of mutual funds to both own huge amounts of stock and administer 401(k) plans and other employee-benefit services for the companies in which they hold substantial positions.
Point 1: If you expense them, you are double counting the expense as the fully diluted EPS calculation takes into account the shares due to outstanding options. Point 13: why are you against it?
