Bethany McLean
speaker
391 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Bethany McLean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, I think it's both.
The raw numbers were a failure because the gatekeepers failed in their job.
And that to me is still the most instructive lesson from Enron's collapse, which is that you think that people like auditors and law firms and a board of directors is there to protect you, the individual investor.
But the more you learn, the more you realize that their main incentive is keeping the company happy.
And that's still true today.
And it's not even so much a question just of your greed and who pays them.
It's also just human nature.
When your approval rests on somebody else saying good job, you start to want them to say good job.
And that happens time and time again.
We see that the auditors have failed investors many times since Enron.
And so it's just a really important lesson to know that just because the auditors and the lawyers and the board of directors say it's okay, and just because the bankers have a buy rating on the stock, that doesn't mean it's okay.
It's funny.
So I joked when I wrote about Enron way back when Fortune magazine, where I worked at the time, had labeled Enron its most innovative company for the previous seven years.
And I still think that Enron was the most innovative company in corporate America, even 25 years later, because they used all of those tools in order to make their reported earnings look much better than they were.
And one of the fascinating things about Enron is that people think of it as this giant fraud.
It actually wasn't.
There was a lot of reality to their business.
The fraud lay in just pushing the boundaries of generally accepted accounting principles past the breaking point in a few key ways.
But most of what they did was legal.
And what they did was figure out how to create reported earnings, even when the economic substance wasn't there.
Showing 201–220 of 391 · page 11 of 20
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