Stupidity is contagious. It gets us all from time to time. Even respectable companies can catch it. As I do every week, let's take a look at five dumb financial events this week that may make your head spin.

1. This explains the air sickness bags
There's a skirmish breaking out between airlines and travel portals. Unfortunately, it's a lose-lose-lose war.

Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE) and some other travel-booking websites are no longer offering flights on AMR's (NYSE: AMR) American and American Eagle. The cause of the dispute -- booking fees and the way flight information is accessed -- is now secondary to the ramifications of the tussle itself.

Travel-seeking consumers will begin to doubt that they are getting complete snapshots of their flight options, even though several popular sites are still on good terms with AMR. The lack of information will also result in lower conversion rates for the portals and greater pricing volatility and booking uncertainty for the carriers.

There were reports that AMR and Expedia were hammering out their differences, but now travel information site Sabre has jumped into the fray by penalizing AMR's listings.

The bumpy flight continues.

2. Start living up to your name, Best Buy
Would you pay Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) a 10% premium today to trade back a television or a laptop for 20% of the price in 18 months? This is the kind of wacky math that buyers of consumer gadgetry will have to begin working at as they wait their turn at the superstore's register.

Best Buy was rumored to begin offering Buy Back protection this week. It hasn't been made official, though a Best Buy statement to an Orlando news station confirms that the offering is real and on the way.

If I want to buy a tablet and sell it back for half of its price within the first six months, why do I need to pay a premium over that at the time of the original purchase? Best Buy may be billing this as obsolescence insurance, but it's starting to feel more like those maintenance agreements that rarely make financial sense.

I'm sure that a $500 laptop I buy today won't be worth much by the summer of 2012, but I'm sure I can get more than $100 for it without having to pay an upfront premium.

3. Adding injury to insult
When it was revealed this week that Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) was paying $450 million for a 0.9% stake in Facebook -- valuing the fast-growing social network at a whopping $50 billion -- it didn't seem outrageous.

Goldman was simply overpaying so it would have first dibs on being lead underwriter in the eventual IPO. How can Facebook be worth $50 billion? However, then Goldman began selling shares to its prized clients, initially without a whole lot of insight into Facebook's actual financials.

Yikes! If Goldman Sachs were my Facebook friend, I would be defriending it about now.

4. It's never too late to hit the reset button
Positive comps can still be a negative for GameStop (NYSE: GME).

Shares of the video game retailer fell by 6% yesterday, after announcing a 3.4% uptick in comps during the nine-week holiday season.

The performance isn't as upbeat as you may think. GameStop's comps tanked 8.6% during the 2009 holiday season, so the chain is still far behind where it was two years ago at the store level.

This was also the quarter in which gamers everywhere were snapping up Kinect motion-based sensors and a record number of Activision Blizzard's (Nasdaq: ATVI) Call of Duty: Black Ops. Industry watcher NPD had figured that industry sales climbed 8% in November, so either December was a dud or GameStop's a laggard.

Put all that together and a negative reaction to positive sales makes perfect sense.

5. Apple's wake-up call
Could Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) official absence from this week's Consumer Electronics Show be the result of fears that its iPhone alarm wouldn't go off in time for trolling for booth babes?

I jest, but Apple did have a rare embarrassing episode when non-recurring alarms failed to go off on updated iPhone 4 smartphones after New Year's Day. The problem was remedied by Monday, but this is also the same model that forced Apple to distribute free cases to tackle an antenna reception problem during the first few months of last year's release.

This incident is minor in comparison, but Apple needs to be careful. Too many flubs and you eat into brand premiums and create gun-shy early adopters.

Which of these five moves do you think is the dumbest? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.