It's become the de facto rule these days that you can't trust anything coming out of a CEO's mouth (or from their PR person/Spin Doctor). Just this week alone there's been a brouhaha about whether Apple CEO Steve Jobs truthfully answered questions about his personal health. Jobs, who once battled pancreatic cancer, appeared earlier this summer looking gaunt and sickly at a developer's conference—yet his mouthpiece told the press that he only had a "common bug." We all know now that Jobs had a little more than a sore throat—but then, most people were dubious to begin with.

That's because it's not exceptional for CEOs to lie or tell half-truths. It's a given. Take Citi CEO Vikram Pandit, who took the helm of the beleaguered bank back in January. As Portfolio notes, he told investors on his first earnings call the following:

"The first priority of risk has been to make sure that our legacy portfolio of assets in the sub-prime and mortgage areas are separated and managed to be optimized, and we have done that. We have also made sure they are well-capitalized."

Those comments would have been fine if they weren't completely untrue. Just a mere three months later, the company wrote down a total of $12.1 billion in losses, and three months after that, they wrote down an additional $7 billion. Pandit and Jobs aren't alone, though. The award for the biggest whopper of the year goes to the former CEO of the now defunct investment bank Bear Sterns. Just days before the bank collapsed, Alan Schwartz proclaimed on CNBC that, "Bear Stearns' balance sheet, liquidity, and capital remain strong."

Riiiiiight.

How did things ever get to this point? It's baffling, considering that CEOs have a responsibility to their shareholders and investors, the people who effectively write their paycheck every month. Yet fibbing seems to have become so ingrained in corporate culture, perhaps going to back to Enron, that it seems questionable whether anyone could put a stop to it even if they wanted to.

What do you think?