Maggie's Farm

What an unmitigated pile of horse shit. Nicole Gelinas use of Enron as an example of a business that made accounting errors and complex business deals and then got penalized by the government unfairly is dung.

I'm not going to take the time to critique an article as long and as full of crap as his but I can point the MF people to the fabulous work of then Wall Street Journal writer Charles Gasparino.

Reviews of the book by almost all the major business publications were glowing:

"Blood on the Street is a riveting account of the Wall Street scam in which ordinary investors lost literally billions of dollars -- in many cases their life savings -- in one of the greatest deceptions ever, by the crack reporter who broke the original story. In one of the most outrageous examples of dirty dealing in the history of Wall Street, hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits were made during the booming 1990s as a result of research analysts issuing positive stock ratings on companies that kicked back investment banking business. Now, for the first time, award-winning journalist Charles Gasparino reveals the whole fascinating story of greed, arrogance, and corruption. It was Gasparino's front-page reporting in The Wall Street Journal that brought the story to national attention and spurred New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer to launch an official probe. Now, Gasparino goes behind his own headlines to tell the inside story of this spectacular swindle -- with revelations from his unprecedented access to never-before-published depositions and documents, including e-mail exchanges leading all the way up to Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill. Drawing on his research and interviews with industry insiders, Gasparino takes readers into the back rooms of Wall Street's top investment firms and captures the outsize personalities of three key players: Salomon Smith Barney's Jack Grubman, a braggart with one of the largest salaries on Wall Street; Merrill Lynch's Henry Blodget, the Yale graduate who hyped his way to the top of the research pyramid; and Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker, the ""Queen of the Internet,"" who foresaw the market catastrophe but gave in to the pressures Blood on the Street shows how regulators, like former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt, allowed the deceptive practices to fester and grow during the 1990s bubble, leaving the door open for a then- little-known attorney general from New York State to step in and make his mark by holding Wall Street accountable. Gasparino provides the first major account of Spitzer's rise to prominence, detailing how the attorney general pursued key players to build his case against Wall Street, including his shifting allegiance to the powerful New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso. A fast-paced narrative rich in sharp insights, Blood on the Street is the definitive book on the financial debacle that affected millions of Americans. "
The above description doesn't even begin to get into Enron traders manipulation of the California energy market and the billions they extorted from that state. It's all on tape folks and listening to the traders laughing about taking down power stations on false pretexts' so they could then drive the price of energy up is as cold blooded as it gets.

It doesn't mention the analysts being pressured to give great due diligence reports in order to get more business.
Enron was a scam and Ken Lay is worm food and good riddance, Skilling and Fastow are doing time but not nearly enough for the damage they did.
No Enron wasn't anywhere close to capitalism, it was fraud.

NJ,

Enron doesn't bother you and the sole reason you offer is that the guilty were punished?

I guess then Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau,Auschwitz-Birkenau didn't bother you because the guilt were punished.

Are you saying that out and out fraud that ruined hundreds of thousands of peoples lives doesn't bother you? Would it have been OK if the guilty had gotten away with their crimes? WOW.