Quote:
Originally Posted by flere-imsaho
OK, first of all let's not forget that Enron went into bankruptcy primarily because people in the industry, and the financial press, started asking questions about their ridiculous results, which led to more scrutiny and thus less creative accounting, and once the creative accounting was gone, the house of cards fell and the SEC finally took action after the market had spoken and sent Enron towards bankruptcy.
Even at this point Enron executives were regular members of Dick Cheney's energy task force and high-level executives were very close to the White House.
Having said that, I don't think you can blame Enron on Bush or Clinton. It goes back to the culture of deregulation started under Reagan and aggressively pursued by Alan Greenspan and Congressional Republicans.
|
You make a lot of good points, but don't forget that it was Arthur Andersen that was asleep at the wheel. People I know who worked for AA said it was the day that AA went into consulting that sealed the fate of the company because the integrity needed on the auditing side got trumped by the profit margins demanded by the consulting side. Towards the end of its lifetime the consultants were calling all the shots at AA, and if I remember right the AA consultants came up with a lot of the shady schemes Enron used.