The article that spurred this article for me is from WashingtonPost.com, with a headline of “Wachovia Posts the Largest-Ever Loss for a Bank.”  Dramatic.  Catchy.  Untrue – this article is full of shit.  What I get out of this after reading through the whole thing – mouth agape – is that the author, Zachary Goldfarb, believes that this title is deserving while putting the truth in the sixth paragraph.  There he writes:

Most of Wachovia’s loss — $18.8 billion — stems from writing down the value of its reputation, brand and experience, an intangible measure known as “goodwill” that mainly plays a role in setting a company’s value in mergers and acquisitions. The company lost $2.5 billion on its portfolio of loans and put away billions more to cover expected future losses.

That, to me, is a lot different than having thousands of homeowners go belly up or run away from their loans resulting in the sale of something for $400,000 that they originally loaned $800,000 on; resulting in a loss of $400,000.  This, to me, is like someone saying “we thought our company was worth $18.8 billion dollars more than it was.  Whoops.

So, was the article truthful, yeah, they did “lose” a lot of money, but  into it and saying that their loss is the most important thing here, perhaps the author could have told the American public that the tax laws that allow them to take this loss (thus paying less taxes) need to be changed in a way that doesn’t allow this extreme behavior.  Why does the media have to perpetuate the negative or walk a gray line – why can’t they report the truth?

Did Wachovia lose a shitload of money?  Yes, they lost a lot of money and I don’t imagine that they will stop bleeding red ink any time soon.  That’s fine, everyone knows that, but did they really lose $23.9 billion last quarter?  I don’t think so, but then again I don’t work for the WashingtonPost.com.

Ranter