- In a nation where more than half of all
households are invested in the stock market, the largest corporate bankruptcy
in U.S. history of the United States should put the fear of God in us.
Primarily, it seems to have fueled fears about our retirements.
America is surprisingly unmoved by the Enron meltdown, according to pollsters
at Gallup. "Even before the Enron crisis moved to the nation's front
pages," Gallup tells us, "Americans had relatively low opinions
of the honesty and ethics of business executives, did not have a great
deal of confidence in business as an institution, and felt that business
already has too much influence in society."
America trusts no one, except maybe its firefighters. America just wants
to retire in peace and security. Or so they tell us over at Gallup.
Granted, in a match between firefighters and corporate leaders, only a
fool would put money on the integrity of the execs. But the Enron scandal
deserves our outrage. It serves as an indictment of our entire financial
and political system. It can and should be a catalyst for change.
It's true the Enron scandal is mind-boggling and complicated. Kenneth Lay,
the former chairman and CEO of Enron (and former buddy of President Bush),
said that all those partnerships and inflated profits were too hard for
him to understand; in August, Lay said it was all "way over my head."
Lay has a kind, grandfatherly reputation, which he seems to be trying to
resurrect. But he understood enough to make off with $200 million dollars
in just under three years. Maybe he should have spent less time in his
five -- yes, five -- ski houses in Aspen, Colorado, and more time boning
up on the company he was supposedly running.
We could, of course, wait for the inevitable Hollywood epic to tackle Enron's
collapse and to digest its lessons for us -- to tar the villains and to
lionize those few who tried to blow the whistle. But before Miramax or
HBO gets to it, even the most financially uneducated layperson can understand
enough about Enron to see that change is necessary.
The problems brought to light by Enron color both the public and private
sector. In a country that takes its world-class transparency and accountability
for granted, our private safeguards failed us shamefully. The analysts,
investment bankers, accountants, and conventional bankers all stood to
profit from buying into Enron, so they opted not to call it out on its
lies. As long as people were buying into the bottom of the pyramid, everyone
who might have spoken out preferred cashing out at the top. The business
press, for the most part, was too fawning and wrapped up in the game to
look at the hard facts or to take note when the initial alarms were sounded.
In the public sector, politicians and government regulators were too indebted
to the private sector to oversee it. The problems cut across party lines.
Politicians from both parties took money from Enron: 212 of the 248 members
of congress investigating the affair, to be precise. Clinton's administration
was not exempt. Enron was generous with the government, and Enron got what
it wanted from the government, in a startling number of cases.
What follows is an imaginary conversation, intended as a kind of primer
-- not only ten things you might want to know about Enron, but ten things
that bear repeating about Enron. Enron's collapse is symptomatic of a deep-seated
disease. All of our retirements are at stake.
What the hell happened?
Enron traded energy, at first. It was good at trading energy. It created
an online commodities market for energy, which basically meant it created
a marketplace where people could buy and sell energy. Enron also produced
energy. Its commodities market was a big change from the rule of state-regulated
monopolies. Trading energy was a fine business idea, possibly even a groundbreaking
one. It was not, as Enron had us believing for a while, the be-all end-all
of corporate creativity.
The people at Enron were smart, but not as smart as they thought they were.
They tried to trade it all: energy, "weather derivatives," broadband
Internet access, water, news, you name it. They failed. They lost, according
to Newsweek's estimates, $2 billion on broadband, $2 billion on water investments,
$2 billion on a Brazilian utility and $1 billion on an electricity plant
in India.
In order to hide their debt, Enron engaged in "aggressive accounting."
They created partnerships with nominally independent companies. Those companies
were headed by Enron execs, and backed, ultimately, by Enron stock. But
Enron did not count their "partners"' debt as its own. This is
called "off-balance-sheet" accounting. Enron also found fancy
ways to count loans from banks as "profit."
Isn't that illegal?
That's the multibillion-dollar question.
No less than 10 congressional committees, the Justice Department, the FBI,
a host of investigators for civil suits and the Securities Exchange Commission
(SEC) are all looking into whether Enron and/or its accounting and consulting
firm, Arthur Andersen, broke the law.
Another emerging issue centers on Enron and Western energy markets. A lot
of the market figures aren't public, but the evidence suggests that Enron
controlled a huge portion of the California energy market, among others.
When you control the supply of a vital commodity like energy, you can manipulate
the price. Only slightly simplified, the story goes something like this:
Enron lobbies to deregulate market. Market deregulates. Enron gains control
of market. Prices are suddenly very high. Enron reaps huge profits. California
Governor Gray Davis and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Cal.) have asked federal
regulators to investigate whether Enron engaged in price manipulation.
Did Enron fix California's energy prices? Did Enron deliberately mislead
investors? Did they deliberately hide debt and mislead their shareholders?
Did they base their profits on estimates they knew were inflated? Does
unloading your own stock, while you urge or force your employees to buy
or keep it, qualify as illegal insider trading? We shall see.
Don't the accountants who let them get away with this have to answer for
something?
Andersen signed off on Enron's books for years. Andersen also helped Enron
structure its deals and accepted cushy consultancy fees, all the while
acting as an "external auditor" checking Enron's books.
That's not illegal, per se. Most of the so-called Big Five accounting companies
have similar conflicts of interest.
The former head of the SEC, Arthur Levitt, thought those conflicts were
so glaringly inappropriate that he tried to outlaw them two years ago.
His efforts at reform were defeated by vigorous opposition from the industry,
which loosed hordes of lobbyists onto Capitol Hill. Congress responded
by pressuring Levitt against reform.
Levitt now has Congress' attention, and is in high demand. Andersen looks
stupid, and is losing clients. But the rules weren't changed then and are
still the same now, so it will be hard to prove that Andersen broke the
rules.
Come on, someone involved in this mess must have done something illegal.
At Arthur Andersen, some employees have been shredding documents. If Andersen
executives shredded documents after they were informed of the SEC's investigations,
then they broke the law. (According to accounting sources, Andersen's claims
that shredding client documents is customary are suspect. In accounting,
the norm is to keep comprehensive, exhaustive records.)
First off, the government is investigating Andersen's destruction of documents.
Destruction of evidence may be easier to prove than the charges that may
come later, against both Enron and Andersen. If the government can build
an airtight case around shredding, then they can use shredding charges
as leverage. An Andersen executive threatened with prosecution over shredding
paper can be offered a plea bargain, for example, in exchange for testimony
in the more complex fraud case.
Great, so some poor schmoe at Andersen will take the fall for shredding
papers, and no one else will be held accountable.
That's one possible scenario, but a lot is riding on the public's reaction.
Bush made his first efforts to distance himself from the scandal after
a Jan. 26 CBS news poll reported that 6 out of 10 Americans think the administration
is hiding something about Enron. Especially during big scandals, politicians
are sensitive to the public's reaction, that is, the public without the
funds to buy political access. The Enron scandal is just beginning. If
the public stays tuned, and expresses its disgust, politicians will be
forced to begin the clean up of our system.
What finally happened to bring it all crashing down?
On Oct. 16, Enron held a conference call to go over its third quarter.
The failure of many of its investments and the debt from its "partnerships"
could no longer be swept under the accounting rug. Former CEO Jeff Skilling's
sudden departure had attracted additional scrutiny. Enron's chorus of cheerleaders
could no longer ignore the sucking sound that had finally become audible,
to the tune of a $1.2 billion drop in net worth. The pyramid began to crumble,
the house of cards began to tumble, the dam burst -- choose your metaphor.
Another important factor: Enron had changed. Over time, Enron sank more
and more money into risky financial betting, and evolved from an energy
company into what the Los Angeles Times called a "massive trading
operation in derivatives, which are financial contracts that can entail
significant risk." A massive derivatives trading company is a very
different animal from something like, say, CalPine, an energy company that
also does some trading. The derivatives beast entails a whole new world
of risk.
Derivatives allow investors to bet, in effect, on fluctuations in everything
from the water supply to energy prices to the weather. Wendy Gramm, the
wife of Senator Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) chaired the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission until 1993. While there, she helped make sure that Enron's brand
of derivatives trading would be free of government oversight. Weeks after
she left that committee, she was offered a lucrative position on Enron's
board. Enron was free to calculate its profits as it saw fit, while betting
on the weather.
Other spectacular bankruptcies linked to derivatives trading include Orange
County in 1994, Barings Bank in 1995 and Long-Term Capital Management in
2000.
In the end, who got screwed?
Enron's employees, clearly, were hurt the most. As many as 12,000 of them
lost their life savings or their entire pension. They were forced to keep
a certain percentage of their 401(k)s in Enron stock, and encouraged to
invest solely in Enron. In the last few months, just as the share price
was tumbling, Enron management switched pension plans and froze employee
accounts. Employees watched in horror, their hands tied, as the stock lost
most of its value. Illegal? Employees are suing, and intend to find out.
Who else got screwed?
Thousands of American investors have lost money on Enron stock, individually
and through outfits like the Osprey Trust, an Enron entity that financed
some of the company's sketchy partnerships and investments abroad. Over
50 mutual funds and insurance companies invested $2.4 billion dollars in
the trust, which then lost most of its value.
And don't forget investors and power plant workers in Brazil and India.
Enron's reach is broad.
Oddly, even Kmart employees can claim Enron victim status: Kmart's bankruptcy
may have been precipitated in part by the Enron collapse (the collapse
raised the price of a type of insurance called surety bonds).
Didn't anyone notice this mess while it was being created?
Yes! A few, brave souls even tried to do something. Sherron Watkins, an
Enron executive, sent an anonymous letter to Kenneth Lay last August, in
which she wrote, "Dear Mr. Lay, Has Enron become a risky place to
work? For those of us who didn't get rich over the last few years, can
we afford to stay?"
Cliff Baxter, the 43-year-old former Enron exec who allegedly committed
suicide, also complained (he also killed hiimself only two days after telling
an un-named friend who spoke to the New York Times that he might need a
bodyguard). One Enron insider even hired an independent New York law firm
to look at Enron's practices (the law firm, Fried Frank Harris Shriver
& Jacobson, made the not-so-surprising recommendation that Enron "halt"
its partnership deals).
-
- A handful of reporters and analysts are
now finding themselves in the spotlight due to skepticism they expressed
anywhere from a few months to a year ago, back when no one would listen.
So no one listened when a few independent thinkers did sound the alarm.
That's depressing. I think I'll just go diversify my portfolio to protect
my retirement.
If we don't do something about the Enrons of the world, we put all of our
portfolios at risk.
It isn't only true believers who lost money on Enron, supposedly conservative
investors sank millions into Enron stocks and funds. And they continue
to sink money -- including, possibly, parts of your retirement -- into
other existing Enron-esque companies.
Enron was never alone in its ways. The CEO of Global Crossing Unlimited,
the largest telecommunications company ever to go belly up, is walking
away with over $700 million from his bankrupted company, while the shareholders
weep. Global Crossing's accounting firm is Arthur Andersen.
The share price of a Bermuda-based, Beverly-Hills-run conglomerate called
Tyco is dropping after word got out that it practices "aggressive
accounting." Tyco's two top execs swore their faith in the company,
saying they rarely if ever sold their own stock in it. They neglected to
mention the $100 million they had already cashed out. Sound familiar?
Since none of our current safeguards worked, the public should demand better
safeguards. The corporate raiders are, by in large, making a killing at
everyone else's expense (even if Kenneth Lay does have to sell his ski
houses). Wall Street isn't likely to stand up and demand greater accountability
and systemic change. It's going to have to be the public.
Will there at least be a Hollywood blockbuster?
Undoubtedly! Stay tuned for AlterNet's upcoming feature, "How Would
You Cast 'All The President's Texas Cronies,' the Enron Saga?"
- Michelle Chihara is a staff writer and
editor at AlterNet.org. http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12326
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