Introduction

This documentary based on a bestselling book “The Smartest Guys in the Room” by the fortune magazine reporters McLean and Elkind. An expose on greed, lies, hubris, arrogance, ethical malfeasance etc. that brought the company down to its knees and later to the trials. The film digs out a lot of dirt and does quite a good job. Peter Coyote gives the narration in this film explaining how Enron became a multinational corporation.

The documentary tries to explain that this was a con game from the word go. Enron became one of the largest corporations in the U.S; using a Ponzi scheme. While in its last days before the fall it looted all the retirement funds of its employees which bought them some little time. Some of the techniques they used to keep their stock price climbing were the “mark to market” technique. Where if in 10 years they would make $X, they would claim $X as their current income. Another technique they used was creating corporate shells, and later moving their losses to these companies which were off the accounting books.

It was quite hard to say what the company traded, gas? Electricity? Or natural gas? The corporation just created a market in the energy sector, where it gambled and manipulated it. When the traders made massive losses enough to lose the company, they hide their losses by producing false profit reports in the news.  They even create a power shortage in California by aliasing with power plants managers, which helped them raise the power price by nine times.

Conclusion

            In my understanding, Enron was a good company that made bad choices and led to all this financial chaos. Even when the executives were sure that the corporation was bankrupt, they assured the masses that this was the best energy corporation in the world. The bookkeeping had been corrupted such that, afterwards the Arthur Anderson accounting firm was destroyed to the ground.