Brian Cook's Blog

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers. – Oscar Wilde

Strike One

The first method was the simplest: inventory revaluation.

In terms of the Pax-Jupiter holdings, there were two kinds of inventory: bad and good. If you could reclassify enough material from bad to good, both reducing the monetary reserves required to destroy obsolete materials and recording them as an asset, you generated profit.

But he’d gone to it already, a year ago. He’d reclassified hundreds of millions in arguably obsolete inventory to an active status. He’d also spent five hours in a room justifying it to a red-faced partner of the accounting firm employed to audit Pax-Jupiter’s books. The partner declared it subjective. Rudy agreed. And since he was the expert on his own inventory, his opinion was the one that mattered. Rudy won. But the victory had pumped that well dry. It took him less than an hour to prove it impossible to employ it again to bridge the profit gap.

Strike one.