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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Can superstars even exist the way they used to?
2016 was sort of that last era of monoculture where we still consumed things in community. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce at that point.
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Chapter 2: What led to the rise of Enron as a major corporation?
And there was this idea that was really huge in the 80s that ā If you got government out of the way, competition was going to drive innovation, was going to lower prices, was going to benefit society in myriad ways. That is not untrue. The problem is when you deregulate competition. fully and just basically say, we're checked out from now on until something really bad happens.
Something bad always happens. That's the problem with deregulation in the 80s. Not that there's a problem with deregulation, that it was done incorrectly like it seems to be every single time.
Yeah. I mean Reagan is also in the documentary quoted as talking about the magic of the marketplace. And we've talked about this over and over on the show, and this is not an attack on conservatism, but deregulation in the marketplace and letting the free market decide things. Thank you very much.
lots and lots of money, and you have humans operating systems, there are inevitably going to be greedy humans with so much hubris that they sell their souls to make money. And that's what happens every single time, yet lessons are still not learned
that there are certain kinds of humans and they always seem to be the ones in charge here of these systems, they will take advantage of them to the detriment of the little guy and the little lady. And that is 100% what happened with Enron.
Yeah, and I don't know if it's always like they're not taking into account human greed. I think most of the people who are powerful enough to deregulate federal energy regulations don't really care in a lot of cases. They know that they're going to make a boatload of money by the time the thing really kind of blows up sometime down the line. I think it could be either one.
But there was a big sea change in 1984, a big change to regulation. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said, hey, you can now buy and sell gas, natural gas, from any seller anywhere in the United States. You don't have to just buy and sell within your state. And that opened up ā an entirely new market. And all of a sudden, you can make a lot more money moving this stuff around.
But like you said, they figured out at Enron, you can make even more money by selling this stuff as commodities and trading on like futures and turning them into financial instruments, not actual just natural gas or oil or electricity, but the concepts of them, the right to sell that or buy that sometime down the road. That changed absolutely everything.
Yeah, and this is when things ā when you get into finance like this, my ā it's not that my eyeballs glaze over. It just becomes almost ā And I say almost not real because it is kind of not real. It becomes a form of gambling in a way. And that's very much what happened at Enron in a lot of ways. And you'll kind of see here and there throughout the episode.
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Chapter 3: How did deregulation impact Enron's business model?
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As opposed to his brain. Here's some hard truths.
I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration.
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Chapter 4: What innovative strategies did Enron employ to maximize profits?
It was doing really, really well. And all the while, it was called pump and dump. They would drive up the value of their stock and then the upper echelon. And you see this time and time again in the corporate world. The CEOs and the CFOs and the upper management are the one who then sell off their stock and walk away with ā Some of them hundreds of millions of dollars.
And some of the schemes that you talked about was they found ways to move debt around. We mentioned Fastile was one of their hires. And he was hired in, I think, his late 20s, early 30s and quickly rose up the ranks to CFO. And he started a company called called LSM, which stood for Leah, Jeffrey, and Matthew, which are named after his wife and kids, sort of ironically.
It was like such a sweet tribute to them. And the only purpose of this company was to have all kinds of sort of little sub-companies that would absorb the debt and where they could move debt around from Enron to make it invisible to the shareholders. Right. So they could prove...
on a balance sheet that you had this money coming in and the way of, you know, people investing in the company, but then you're hiding the losses. And so everyone thinks you're doing great.
So the way that I saw it explained, Investopedia actually has a couple of really good articles about this that are just wonky enough to like understand it, but also not so wonky that you're just like, I have no idea what I'm reading. And the way they put it was basically if Enron had like a good example is they build a power station in India. That was a huge loss.
It was just a generally bad idea. And they sunk billions and millions of dollars into this power station without realizing any money whatsoever. I think they abandoned it.
before it even came online, they would take this and sell it to one of these special purpose vehicles or special purpose entities, which was a tangentially related company that the company Enron was not on the hook to pay off its debts for, right? And they would take that and then that special purpose vehicle would go out and try to sell it, sell that terrible toxic asset.
And they would use Enron stock as the collateral, right? And because Enron stock was just through the roof, everybody was saying, sure, we'll give you a loan. Sure, we'll give you some money for that terrible idea of a power plant that you abandoned because you're backing it up with Enron stock.
And as long as the time that that stock came due was far enough away, and as long as Enron stock kept going up, this house of cards could be held together. But that's not at all how it worked. The upshot of it is that
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Chapter 5: Who were the key players in the Enron scandal?
But the other thing that really, really helped was the banks. Wall Street banks were very much complicit in this as well. And then the thing that helped the most was Arthur Anderson, the venerable 80-plus-year-old accounting firm. The oldest one in the country. Yeah, that was a third-party accountant to Enron.
Was so cozy that they actually hired all of Enron's internal auditing staff, made them Arthur Anderson staff, and then opened a 150-person office for Enron in Enron's headquarters. An Arthur Anderson office in Enron's headquarters made up of former Enron auditors. That's who was watching the show. And so...
Arthur Anderson had such a good reputation that because they were signing off on this, because the Wall Street analysts were saying, yeah, it's a buy, people were just like, I'm buying, I'm buying. And it kept the stock prices going up and up and up because nobody was paying attention enough.
Yeah, there was one person in the doc that said, that kind of crystallized it, which was like, I'm paraphrasing, but he was talking about the fact that when this kind of stuff pops up in corporations, like, it's not like this... The Enrons are everywhere. There is all kinds of malfeasance for sure in the corporate world.
But he basically said somewhere along the way it doesn't get this big because a legal team says you can't do this or your accountants say you can't do this or the banks say we can't get involved in this. And Enron seemed to be one of those ā sort of unicorns where every person along the way just zipped their mouth shut, even though the numbers weren't adding up and was complicit in this.
Right. There was a trader that was interviewed in the documentary who said, like, it was ironic that Enron's slogan was ask why. Like, why does something happen like that? Why can't we do it that way? And that this trader said, I didn't ask myself why because I didn't want to know. I suspected things were weird or awry, and I just didn't want to know because it was my job.
I was making tons of money. And I think you can probably get that excuse out of just about anybody who is complicit in this large or small thing. But Arthur Anderson, that was the one that really, really helped things along. And as we'll see, they didn't manage to survive the scandal.
Yeah, there were ā oh, man, there was that one part of the documentary where they were talking about Fastow's shell companies. And he was in a meeting that was secretly taped, and they were basically like, well, wait a minute. It looks like you're on the buying and selling sides of these transactions. Right. And he was like, yeah. Yeah. Basically, but I've always got LMJ's interest at heart.
And the whole time he's skimming money and they believe that Skilling and Lay knew that like, hey, I'm sure that Fastow is skimming money off the top for himself. Right. Who cares? Because this guy is taking care of business for us. Exactly.
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Chapter 6: What role did accounting practices play in Enron's downfall?
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted basically because of Enron in 2002, which was ā and I remember years ago when we were working in our early days at HowStuffWorks, there was a lot of Sarbanes-Oxley talk. Do you remember that stuff?
Yeah, because they came up with the Frank Dodd Act to basically undo or combat against future stuff from the 2008 financial crisis. This was the same thing six years prior. Enron had such a huge effect that they passed a law that basically point for point outlawed all the stuff that Enron had done. They did the same thing with the Dodd-Frank Act, or they tried to.
And, of course, you know, certain people will say Sarbanes-Oxley has no real teeth anymore because they're not even funding the oversight that they promised other people. You know, the diehard free marketers will say that's actually too restrictive. We're not able to be competitive anymore because you've got all these rules now to make sure we're not defrauding people of billions of dollars.
Right, yeah. You're making it hard to exploit people. Come on. So there was actual convictions. Like, this is crazy. And one of the heartening things, Chuck, is if you watch, like, these congressional hearings on this, people from both sides of the aisle are grilling these guys. Oh, yeah.
No one was apologizing to them for their, you know, their colleague from the other side of the aisle asking, you know, mean questions. Everyone was mad at these guys. The whole world hated Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay and Andrew Fastow.
He was so smug up there, man, answering those questions. Oh, dude. In the face of all that, he was still so smug about it.
I looked up whether he ever apologized and I could not find it. I don't think Jeffrey Skilling ever apologized. I think he went throughout his entire time in prison basically saying like he was a victim, that this was unfair. But he was imprisoned. He was an executive that was in prison. That just does not happen lately. He was convicted of 19 counts, fraud, conspiracy, insider trading.
He got 24 years in prison and ended up serving 12, which is ā I mean, yeah, that sucks, but it's stillā 12 years is nothing to sneeze at. No, for sure. That's a long time to do in the clink. And then Ken Lay, he was convicted on 10 counts, but he wasn't able to be sentenced because he died of a heart attack six weeks after being convicted. And I think his conviction was vacated.
Yeah. Skilling now is out and works at an oil and gas analytics startup. It seems that other people ā I think we ā yeah, I mentioned that Fastile was on the speaker circuit. The whistleblower, Ms. Watkins, was named Time's Person of the Year in 2002. And I believe is also now a paid speaker and executive in residence at Texas State University.
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Chapter 7: How did the California energy crisis relate to Enron's actions?
2016 was sort of that last era of monoculture where we still consumed things in community. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce at that point.
I don't think we'll ever see another Rihanna.
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