Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a new podcast of Grant's interest rate observer. I am Jim Grant, and with me today, as usual, is Eric Whitehead, who's on the controls. He is our engineer, and the great Evan Merens, deputy editor of grants,

is also on the scene.

I think in the background,

not so far,

is Philip Grant,

the associate publisher of grants,

and the author of the almost daily grants.

That leaves Saturday and Sunday most weeks for time.

But, hey, Evan, I wanted to begin by, first of all, by acknowledging our kind sponsor,

Pitney Bowes, and secondly, to observe that this episode is also sponsored in the way of Sesame Street by the word somewhat.

We'll get around to that in a second. But we have a quality of

earnings discussion, do we not? That we do. Whirlpool, the grants Bent Noir from Ben Harbour reported

earnings today as we were recording right now. The company reported amiss. Its adjusted EPS came in at

$3.35 cents and the street was expecting $3.53. However, if you

peeled down below the first couple sentences in the press release, gap earnings actually came in at $2.52

cents, well below the non-gap numbers. And in fact, over the last year, World Polls earned $9.99

in gap earnings, the audited kind that the, you know, the auditors

approve of, versus $13.84 in the non-gap variety. The quality of Whirlpool's earnings

seems to deteriorate as time goes on. Just to give an example, they backed out $59 million in

restructuring charges in the most recent quarter versus $40 million in the same period a year ago.

The restructuring charges are all related to an acquisition rule pool made in the fourth quarter of 2014.

So this acquisition that's now two and a half years into corporate history is accruing larger and larger

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