One week ago, in a valiant attempt to defend the stock price of struggling commodity trading titan Glencore, one of the company's biggest cheerleaders, Sanford Bernstein's analyst Paul Gait (who has a GLEN price target of 450p) appeared on CNBC in what promptly devolved into a great example of just how confused equity analysts are when it comes to analyzing highly complex debt-laden balance sheets.

In the clip below, starting about 2:30 in, CNBC's Brian Sullivan gets into a heated spat with Gait over precisely how much debt Glencore really has, with one saying $45 billion the other claiming it is a whopping $100 billion.

The reason for Gait's confusion is that he simplistically looked at the net debt reported on Glencore's books... just as Ivan Glasenberg intended.