Years ago, I half-read something by Malcolm Gladwell about how he wasn’t sure that the Enron execs did anything wrong. Gladwell’s thing is not my thing; he’s the kind of faux intellectual others love that I find empty and lacking. But at the time, having no idea what actually brought Enron down, I figured he might be on to something.
Well he wasn’t. Malcolm Gladwell is wrong again.
Also, the things rich white men get away with…
I am a white man, not rich by any means, but still. Maybe it’s a bit smarmy for me to say that. But I’m currently watching the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court tap dance on the Constitution with impunity. I just lived through four years of a rich white guy who had never heard the word “no” spreading his poison on our country. And I roll my eyes at the lack of accountability for other white men.
And I think that’s the main part of the Enron story: how people who look like each other and are in the same tax bracket give their contemporaries the benefit of the doubt. Goldman Sachs. Merrill Lynch. Lehman Brothers. Standard & Poor’s. The SEC. President George W. Bush. And on and on. All of them not looking behind Enron’s impossibly great returns because they trust each other. They believe in each other. They want each other to succeed.
Screw em all.
At any rate, this one is tough to read at times because I have little expertise in the respective worlds of finance and energy. But the authors do a good job making it as accessible as they possibly can. And by the end, I sort of understood, though I appeared to be in the same quagmire that both the government and general public were as to how Enron pulled off such a long con and how involved their people were into it.
So yeah, it’s a good book just based on how infuriating of a read it was. Worth your time.