In this commanding big-picture analysis of what went wrong in corporate America, Alex Berenson, a top financial investigative reporter for The New York Times, examines the common thread connecting Enron, Worldcom, Halliburton, Computer Associates, Tyco, and other recent corporate scandals: the cult of the number.

Every three months, 14,000 publicly traded companies report sales and profits to their shareholders. Nothing is more important in these quarterly announcements than earnings per share, the lodestar that investors—and these days, that’s most of us—use to judge the health of corporate America. earnings per share is the number for which all other numbers are sacrificed. It is the distilled truth of a company’s health.

《纽约时报》首席金融调查记者亚历克斯·贝伦森（Alex Berenson）对美国企业界出了什么问题进行了宏观分析，分析了安然（Enron）、世通（Worldcom）、哈里伯顿（Halliburton）、计算机联合公司（Computer Associates）、泰科（Tyco）和其他近期企业丑闻之间的共同点：数字崇拜。
每三个月，就有14000家上市公司向股东报告销售额和利润。在这些季度公告中，没有什么比每股收益更重要了，每股收益是投资者和现在我们大多数人用来判断美国企业健康状况的指标。每股收益是牺牲所有其他数字的数字。这是公司健康的精髓。