Interesting parallels... [View all]

I want to tell you a story about a little company called Enron, one of the most powerful corporations that ever existed in the history of capitalism before it disappeared in a flash fraud.

I know most of you already know the outline, but I want to provide a short review, for reasons that will become clear.

At its height, Enron was considered the #1 most innovative company in America. It is the ONLY company in the history of FORTUNE Magazine to grace the cover twice. The CEO was a hero and Enron was ranked the #1 employer in the nation.

An excellent documentary about Enron’s shady business model, their political connections, their global domination of energy markets, and eventual collapse is titled, The Smartest Guys in the Room. In short, the people who ran Enron were universally considered ‘geniuses’ by the corporate media, the financial press, and a flock of shareholder fans.

After a decade of rampant sales and profit growth, some accounting experts noticed that something didn’t add up with Enron’s accounting numbers. At the time, no one would have ever conceived that Enron was for years engaged in the largest accounting fraud in the history of the US. Enron even had one of the most respected global accounting firms, Arthur Anderson LLP, sign off on the cooked numbers.

As Enron’s stock started to plummet, the corporate insiders including the founding family, the CEO, the CFO, and all the early investors started bailing on the stock. At the same time they were dumping their shares, these executives held an ‘All Hands’ meeting with their employees, imploring them not to sell their shares—which for many longtime employees was their entire retirement nest egg. These were regular workers, sales people, machinists, engineers, and others who invested their life and soul into this company, and had worked for many years, expecting to have a comfortable retirement.

At the time, no one thought the fastest-growing and most innovative company in the US could be built on pure fraud. Literal smoke and mirrors. Enron would become famous as the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history, and the fallout was only contained because Enron’s executives were best friends with the White House administration.

Does any of this sound familiar?….

(C&P from a FB post—no clue who to give credit to…)