More transparency is needed, along with clearer guidelines.” We have to ensure safe investments to grow industries and create jobs for those workers. If you don’t protect them, there will be societal collapse. The people who make the economy work are the workers. “There will always be foolish people, dishonest people and greedy people. pointed out that workers, not executives, are the backbone of the economy. Unbelievable that we allow this as a society.”
Californians paying high electric bills, lost pensions, etc.) Then I read that Jeff Skilling is now out of prison and back at doing essentially the same line of work. “It makes me so mad that all the top people in the firm walked away with millions mostly funded by everyday people trying to make a living (i.e. One of our listeners, Carrie, expressed frustration with Skilling’s seeming rebound. You can read or listen to David Brancaccio in conversation with The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig on what the saga taught us about investing and with The Economist’s Vijay Vaitheeswaran on echoes of Enron’s energy deregulation in California and Texas today. And former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who served 12 years in prison, recently launched an energy investment venture.Įnron’s complicated legacy doesn’t end there.
Before filing for bankruptcy in 2001, Enron paid out a whopping $745 million in cash and stock to senior executives. “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” showed us how tens of thousands of employees lost their jobs and $2 billion in retirement funds.
The tale of an energy titan that deceived investors and regulators, devastating its workers’ livelihoods in the process, evoked these strong responses from our listeners - even 20 years later. He's now out, released in 2019, and I'm sure he's got some cash stashed away somewhere.Īnd Andrew Fastow, the man who got most of the blame, crooked as a Hillbilly's smile, he got 6 years in prison, gave up nearly $24 million in assets, for testifying AGAINST the guys who let him rob them and everyone else.Unethical, greedy, immoral, selfish, dishonest, appalling, evil. Jeffery Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison, reduced to 14 years following a court case, and fined $45 million dollars. Ken Lay died before he was sentenced for securities fraud in 2006. Those numbers at the end of the film were staggering though, 20000 jobs lost, investors losing $11 billion dollars, and still, some of the executives thought they were going to run off into the sunset with their loot? Sherron Watkins' awkward questions to founder Ken Lay in 2001 when he took over as CEO and his lack of answers, saw her become a whisteblower, and the rest as they say is history. The way certain executives behaved when they saw the beginning of the end, selling their shares for tens of millions of dollars, proved their guilt, and following Jeff Skilling's resignation, the writing was on the wall. This wasn't even capitalism at it's worst, because this wasn't capitalism, it was criminal. And that joke from Jeff Skilling about the difference between California and the Titanic showed just what a shallow and self-centred individual he really was. The energy crisis in California? Wow, was that naughty, people always make money out of catastrophes, but those traders who were celebrating the forest fires with Burn Baby Burn were despicable human beings. I knew some of the story, the fallout especially, and the ties that Enron had to George Walker Bush, but the intricacies of the fraud was utterly incredible when it was spelled out for a layman. This documentary will make you scratch your head at the insanity of what Enron and it's bunch of crooked and deluded executives got up to, but if you're anything like me you'll be quickly looking to see what happened to these guys following the investigation.Īlex Gibney's documentary is one I'd been meaning to watch for years, but simply never gotten around to. Gordon Gekko famously said in Stone's Wall Street, that greed was good, but that's hard to tell someone who's just saw their 401 and their pension pot frittered away in the largest corporate fraud in history. The amount of bad press that investment bankers, huge corporations, and what most people would call "unscrupulous greedy bastards" have had in recent years following the global financial crash of 2007-2008 has filled headlines time and time again.
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