There were big headlines a few days ago about how Corning posted a $5B+ loss for the quarter. shortly thereafter I overheard several people marveling at the "catastrophe" and surmising that Corning must surely be on the brink of going out of business.


Obviously, the thing these people didn't understand is that the losses are due almost entirely to depreciation of goodwill, acqusition related charges and the recent phase out of "pooling of interests" accounting in mergers. its a paper loss only. All of the companies who followed an aggressive acquisition strategy are now posting these huge losses in large part due the plummeting stock market and NOT any fundamental instability.


Do you think that companies - like Corning, JDS-Uniphase, Applied Materials, Cisco, etc. - that had hyper aggressive acquisition strategies could now be undervalued because of public ignorance of accounting principles?