I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.
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.
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.
Buying only what you know can end in disaster. Just think about Enron's employees and business partners, the 'locals' who bought lots of its stock because they thought they were in the know.
The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America.
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.
I think that the failures of Enron and WorldCom and other companies are partially failures of investors to recognize companies that are selling for a thousand times nothing, but chances are they may be worth only that.
Because the sad fact is that the Enron Corporation and others manipulated with unfortunately great effect the energy market in the West Coast starting in 2000.
What the American people don't understand is how Merrill Lynch or AIG or Lehman Brothers can reward people, and the entity fails. Not only do the shareholders lose, but the entities lose.
It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.
I remember when I did my Enron film, my executive producers at the time felt very strongly that I should mock the Enron executives more viciously because everybody wanted that moment.
What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.
Generally speaking, companies get into bankruptcy as a kind of meritocracy. Somebody made some sort of big mistake, to get into bankruptcy, and very often, a part of the mistake is too much leverage.
At the height of the Enron mania, the company's market value was $65 billion. Once the dust cleared, the final value was $0.
Wouldn't it be great if all of Osama bin Laden's money was tied up in Enron stock?
Top-rank global corporations are collapsing. That could happen sometime, and somehow even to Samsung.
When this crisis began, crucial decisions about what would happen to some of the world's biggest companies - companies employing tens of thousands of people and holding trillions of dollars in assets - took place in hurried discussions in the middle of the night. We should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fall into a rapid and chaotic dissolution or forcing taxpayers to foot the bill.
Gox is the worst-run business in the history of the world.
If you destroy the people of a company, you do not have much left.
Remember Circuit City? Bear Stearns? Lehman Brothers? Sports Authority? Once, all were billion-dollar companies - then gone in a moment. The fatal problem might be fraud or corruption, but more often, it's simply that management didn't see 'over the other side of the hill.'
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.
Was I believer in Enron Corporation? Yes, sir, I was.
I feel somewhat responsible for the Borders Books bankruptcy.
Larry, I spent probably most of my professional life helping to build Enron Corporation. I don't think there was anyone that was as shocked by the - by the collapse of the company as I was.
When I left my job at Lehman Brothers to start a company, my best friend's mother said, 'How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup?' That was three months before Lehman went bankrupt.
