It’s the most important time of the quarter for Wall Street as earnings season begins in earnest this week. More people than normal will be following corporate earnings reports this quarter because of the magnifying glass that is being put on the global economy. Every single number that is released will be analyzed more critically than ever, and that really is the way it should be. Another part of this earnings season that will be so important is the commentary about the future. It isn’t just the analysts that want to know, the entire country wants to know, are things getting any better?

The importance of earnings season has never been greater, but I think of even greater importance is the fact that we get earnings reports we can actually trust. In the past quarters there has been a lot of accounting maneuvers by firms that make earnings look much better than they truly are, which misleads investors and is just plain wrong. Because the financial firms have been those who have been hit the hardest by the credit crisis, and many have been guilty of artificially propping up earnings, those financials that report their earnings will be watched the most closely of all. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and General Electric are all going to be reporting earnings this week, and those reports will be crucial to the overall market direction.

It is a given that the earnings reports will be ugly, because the economy as a whole has been in a major mess. We can take the bad news, but we just need the companies to be completely level with us. The thing that I sincerely hope that we can begin to do once again, is trust that corporations are reporting to us the actual financial standing of their businesses and not simply a facade.