Alex Gibney Quotes

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America.

Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.

'Power Play' is a morality tale for our post-Enron world and - not incidentally - wildly entertaining. Nothing wrong with that.

Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.

How does it happen that virtually every corporation in America has been found guilty of violating the law and not one CEO has got to jail?

I think the presumption is, for some reason, anybody who comes from the business or the corporate world is corrupt.

Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who - thanks largely to the media - has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.

The list of companies that have added their own financial metrics is not a savory group.

During the Enron debacle, it was workers who took the pounding, not bankers. Not only did Enron employees lose their jobs, many lost their retirement savings. That's because they were at the bottom of the investing food chain.

Bush began helping Enron in the eighties.

Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying 'get with the program, be a team player;' this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal.

Many financial and industrial companies have been bailed out with the public's money, but very few of those who had run those companies have been punished for their failures. Yes, the top managers of those companies have lost their jobs - but with a fat pension and mostly with a handsome severance payment.

There are more pompous, arrogant, self-centered, mediocre-type people running corporate America who should be sent out on some postal route delivering mail.

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for 'Barron's' magazine and I found a lot to write about.

But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.

Ken Lay has, does and will continue to accept responsibility for the fall of Enron. He was the man at the controls. But failure is not a crime.

Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct.

A sane person would think that Wal-Mart would never carry 'Capitalism: A Love Story' because it's simply not in their best interests to inform their customers of their shady past.

The pay of many of our top executives in big hundred companies in the U.K. is outrageous and even obscene.

Ralph Nader is the single most effective antagonist of American business.

The average member of the public thinks of 'business' as an impersonal corporate entity, owned by the very rich and managed by over-paid executives.

…the new front of great corporate transgression.

I would fill the penitentiaries and jails of the United States so full of Trust magnates that their arms and legs would stick out the windows.

… the blindness and greed of the so-called captains of industry.