Remora

Limited Inc. was temporarily out of our gourds, this morning. Look, once you settle on a term, it sticks -- like a bad tattoo, maybe, but so it goes. So we apologize to our many constant, passionate readers for this aberration, and hope we haven't harmed our brand. We are going to focus group about that, later.

Will Hutton has a very enjoyable time knocking around that old corrupt mushball, Enron, in his Guardian column. Most startling graf in the column is not in the bludgeoning of America's political culture, but in the dissing of American productivity. Could this be true?

"... Enron could not have made the progress it did without the intellectual backdrop that all regulation and taxation is bad - and that the more the US deregulated, the better its economy performed. This was, and is, balderdash. Recent work by economists, notably at investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston, shows that after making the necessary accounting adjustments and including downward revisions, productivity growth in the US has done no more than match that in Europe. Indeed, countries like France and Germany have higher absolute productivity and faster rates of growth than the Americans, despite their approach to regulation and taxation. The deregulation philosophy that enriches Ken Lay and his cronies does not necessarily enrich anybody else. "

Well, we know last year was a spectacular for accounting revisions -- the capitalist version of redoing history, for which the Soviets used to be so reviled by right thinking rightwingers. Where's Trotsky, these rightwingers would cackle at the pap turned out by USSR history hacks that put Stalin in the catbird seat right next to his old buddy Lenin, and quietly whiteinked the more photogenic (and vastly more important) T. Increasingly, though, Soviet historiography looks like a method ahead of its time, especially for the clever accounting firm -- consulting with its right hand, and doing its books with its left hand. Erasing figures from photographs is one thing, but you need real skill to strip and recombine figures until they don't add up to themselves anymore -- yes, millions of dollars like Cheshire cats, appearing one year as four legged, tail twitching profit, and the next year as merely a fading smile.

Still, Europe has never been known for its accounting transparency. Steinherr, in his book on Derivatives (isn't tout le monde reading that adorable tome? right up there with Harry Potter in most homes), gives the example of Daimler Benz, which when it came to the states (had to, since it was swallowing Chrysler), had to comply with the US GAAP requirements, which is how we do numbers in the New World. German numbers showed a moderate profit, but sieved through GAAP, the company showed an immoderate loss.

So I'd love to know where this Credit Suisse study comes from. I'm not doubting Hutton, just wondering how to face this kind of revisionism.