Mr. Miller cut his own stipend to $29,500 from $39,500, for an overall reduction in leadership special expenses of about five percent.
He says that he uses the money to pay expenses incurred in the course of doing his job, including for "special expenses and helping people".
But, angered by attacks that her candidate was enduring over the price of his haircuts, she then offered to handle any special expenses personally.
These include the special expensing rules for film and television productions, Nascar sites and rum production, and creative tax breaks for both fossil fuels and clean energy.
Of the special expenses, about $150 million will be used to integrate Grindlays Bank, which Standard Chartered bought for $1.3 billion in April as part of a planned Asian expansion.
Excluding special expenses, earnings from continuing operations were 30 cents a share, compared with 41 cents a share in the period a year ago, and below the 37 cents a share that analysts polled by Thomson Financial had expected.
Mr. Bush would give almost everyone a tax cut, while Mr. Gore would give tax relief only to low-income families and those with modest incomes and special expenses like children in day care or college or those with elderly dependents.
That is, instead of admitting that it has been doing a bad job, management claims that bad results are caused by extraordinary, unpredictable events: "We're making lots of money, but we had $1 billion in special expenses associated with our takeover of XYZ Corporation".
More than in any other sector, high-tech firms are calculating earnings not just by applying GAAP, but by using homemade formulas to exclude "special expenses"—a method that invariably makes the numbers look a lot better.On February 4th, for example, Priceline.com, an online travel agency, reported a pro-forma net income of $3.3m, a sum that converted under GAAP rules into a loss of $1.3m.
