Alex Gibney Quotes

You don't want another Enron? Here's your law: If a company, can't explain, in one sentence, what it does... it's illegal.

Opacity on extreme levels is not addressed anywhere, including Dodd-Frank.

If you look at the history of the American capital market, there's probably no innovation more important than the idea of generally accepted accountancy principles.

There are a lot of ethical firms on Wall Street.

If you want to fight the evil you see in finance and industry, get to work reading the corporate filings, see if there has been fraud, and where you find it, report it to the SEC or write about it or blog about it.

Early 2000s, we get Enron, which tells us the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.

When you're a business man, you have a lot of businesses, a lot of times they think you're laundering money or you're pretending you're writing things off that you don't.

If you talk to a top accountant about his field of expertise, it's mind-boggling.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation's corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

In the long run managements stressing accounting appearance over economic substance usually achieve little of either.

Most small-business owners have no financial education when they started. They weren't trained to be entrepreneurs.

The concept of fair value accounting is correct and useful, but the application during periods of crisis is problematic. It's another one of those unintended consequences of making a rule that's supposed to be good that turns out the other way.

If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.

Ultimately, the success of America's market economy depends on trust. This includes trust between buyers and sellers, between lenders and borrowers, and between investors and the companies in which they invest.

I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.'

Companies that are publicly held have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to try to maximize their profits within ethical reasons.

In the business world, we can point to instances when a lack of integrity has bankrupted entire companies - in sectors as different as finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and energy.

We need to change how we run banks. We need to change the culture. If we get it right, we can have a huge impact.

I am not for buying into financial services firms because I am not sure of the quality.

Parsee culture is definitely one of strong business acumen, high ethics, and an element of philanthropy.

I come from a financial news background, originally, so that is a big area of focus for me.

I don't want to talk about the regulation of financial markets because that is not my sphere of expertise. It's a very complicated topic, and if I have written a number of books they are always on topics that I think I know something about.

What happens to a private company that comes out with a quarterly report and an annual report? It gives transparency. It talks of basic issues of governance and transactions with related parties.

There is nothing wrong with good accounting, except that it does not necessarily lead to good science.

I was, as president and chairman of the board, required by law to verify the veracity of the financial figures, the assets under management, the number of outstanding shares, et cetera.