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Another Hedge Fund Manager Doesn’t Like the Smell of Green Mountain’s Accounting

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. […], maker of the single-serve Keurig brewing machine, fell to the lowest in seven months after hedge fund managing director Whitney Tilson said there may be potential for accounting fraud at the company. Green Mountain fell 10 percent to $58.19 at 1:07 p.m. in New York, after dropping to $56.19, the lowest intraday price since March 10. The shares lost 22 percent in the week before today after David Einhorn, the president of Greenlight Capital Inc., said the company has a “litany of accounting questions” and needs to improve its transparency. [Bloomberg, Earlier]

To Keep People From Nodding Off, Stephen Schwarzman Reminded Everyone How Much He Hates Mark-to-Market Accounting

The Blackstone Group co-founder, chairman and CEO is in Seoul hobnobbing with various other titans of industry, finance and politics for the G-20 Business Summit and as you might expect, things can get a little drab.

Dark suits, heavy lunches, important people trying to one-up each other’s stories and so on and so forth can really get tiresome so in order to “keep people awake,” SS brought up a topic near and dear to his heart:

[I]n the United States, we eliminated mark-to-market accounting in 1937, and why did we do that? We completely bankrupted our system before, and for some reason, somebody who liked something called transparency decided to have mark-to-market accounting come back, around the turn of the last century. So it in no way surprises me that we had a catastrophic collapse as a result of implementing mark-to-market accounting.

Not exactly sure who “somebody” is but one guy has retired and another is on his way out, so this could be Schwarzman’s reminder to the outgoing MTM cheerleaders that he hasn’t changed his stance that the whole thing just sucks.