Enron - L'economia della truffa

Based on and named after the bestseller book Smartest Guys in the Room, this documentary provides an insightful look into the scandalous fall of Enron Corp. There are no actors in this documentary and yet it is dramatic. Such were the factors leading to the 'amazing rise and scandalous fall' of Enron that even a documentary featuring events preceding that historic day in December 2001, when Enron filed for the largest bankruptcy in the corporate US history, seems like a tale of epic imagination.

This documentary is neither as detailed nor as insightful as the book, but it does a great job of providing an insightful and reasonably detailed account of the Enron saga. Overall, it is not of any incremental value for the people who have read the book. However, if you can't go through 464 pages, this does a great job of enlightening you on the drama that Enron was.

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is suave and well-crafted, but betrays some wishful thinking and apologist tendencies.

Some ex-Enron workers venture poetic but unmerited speculations about their corrupter associates, conjuring hypothetical images of their former friends now reflecting back on their transgressions and experiencing ethical remorse. We are subjected to clichés about their having to face their own "shadows" and whatnot, all of it speculative, and in spite of any evidence that they ever experienced a moral twinge or regretted anything other than getting caught.

There's also an insidious "slippery slope" message, some philosophical waxing upon the blurriness of ethical lines, and depictions of compulsive personalities, all of which introduce unwarranted moral ambiguity. Bethany McLean, one of the investigative journalists, surprisingly lays overmuch of the blame on Andrew Fastow, declaring that the fraud started with him (!) even though Fastow is elsewhere shown to have been recruited into a company already corrupt from the top down. There is some subtle attempt at containment here. This film skewers the culprits one moment, but then shrinks from the implications.

The WORST example is a naive question given undue emphasis by being left "provocatively" open-ended. The narrator, Peter Coyote, asks, "What motivated the corrupt traders? Was it their million dollar bonuses? Or was it docile complicity?" (I'm paraphrasing here) A no-brainer answer you might think, but then - I kid you not - the documentary suggests the second possibility and launches into the fascinating but entirely irrelevant Milgram experiment, in which reluctant subjects are persuaded by an authority figure to voluntarily electrocute others. But Enron traders were a uniformly sanguine lot, evidenced by testimonials and taped conversations displaying naked greed and delight (generous clips of which are included in the documentary). Yet we are supposed to imagine they were the victims of obedience training?

It's a bit much...

Maybe two or three of the commentators don't pussyfoot around, and through them "The Smartest Guys" successfully conveys the perils of the free market and deregulation; but these lessons get watered down by wistful undertones and feigned ambiguity. Post-Enron, the communist charge that capitalists are "cannibals" now seems undeniably apt. Yet we forever flatter ourselves, rehearsing the cant of the free market ideology, according to which the profit motive encourages 1) innovation and 2) hard work. Granted. But what the pundits and economists invariably overlook is that the profit motive also encourages 3) robbery. Adam Smith's *other* "invisible hand," if you will ...hidden behind the back and gripping a knife! Enron calls for an inquiry into the nature of capitalism, not an explanation based upon specific personalities. Human nature is what it is, and there will always be people ready and willing to cut throats when given motivation and opportunity. To misquote the NRA: People don't kill people.. incentives do.

Final criticism: a bit of shabby hypocrisy. One of the Enron execs is portrayed as having sleazy encounters with strippers; the viewer is then dutifully treated to lots of footage of nude strippers... ha!

I agree with previous posts: "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is right up there with the biggest horror films of our time. And this one is scarier because it's real.

It's hard to say what boggles the mind most:

the complicity of Arthur Andersen, the banks, and the traders in this elaborate scheme of making a failing company look profitable;

the fact that the executives cashed out their stock at high prices and froze the employees' stock accessibility until it was worth nothing;

the derisive laughter of the traders over the Enron-caused blackouts in California ("let them fall into the ocean - let them use candles);

that Lu Pi, a guy who ran a failing Enron company, left that company with $250 million in his pocket;

or the fact that Ken Lay died before they could convict him of anything. Take your pick, it's all disgusting.

When one of the California power companies called Enron and said there was a fire in the plant, the trader chuckled and said, "Burn, baby, burn."

That sums up Enron's, the banks, the traders', and Arthur Andersen's attitude toward the common man - burn, baby, burn. Let's hope that's what Ken Lay is doing right now.

This is a great documentary even if you don't understand business. The only part I didn't quite get were these dummy corporations that Flatow started up to hide Enron's losses which were then invested in by the banks.

That was a little complicated, but you'd think someone would have realized that the CFO of Enron running companies that were supposedly selling to Enron was a conflict of interest. Funny, no bank picked it up. They won't give you a mortgage, but they'll pay a fortune to a dummy corporation.

Probably my favorite part was the mark to market accounting system employed by Enron and signed off on by Arthur Andersen. I have no understanding of a reliable accounting firm allowing such a thing.

In other words, if I have a book proposal, I can report a profit of, say, $30,000 on the book even though it isn't sold and I haven't seen a dime. And one wonders how they cooked their books. With help, that's how.

A very interesting expose on the greed, hubris, lies, etc. that brought Enron down. This film is well-done and digs up a lot of dirt. The PBS viewing showed a little clip after the film which discussed the strange trial results, which was probably the biggest problem with the film - it pretty much ends with the bankruptcy of enron and doesn't show much about the trials, since they took place later, although they would make for a great inclusion. To me, the most incredible part of the film is that fact that these guys would stand up every day and tell bold-faced lies to the employees, the government, the investors, and make it all sound good. They had to be thinking in the back of their head "it's all going to come crashing down someday"...

...because I can't see what's different from what happened here and what the banks did that caused the global collapse of 2008. Turning hard assets into derivatives and selling them on the market? Knowing that a product is worthless and encouraging its trade anyways? This sounds familiar, it's just Enron traded derivatives on fuels and the banks did it on real estate. Thus I guess there is nothing different here other than the banks committed crimes on such a large scale that all of the criminals wouldn't fit into prisons without us building more, plus all of those campaign contributions! Congress couldn't let THAT dry up! So here we sit with 0% interest rates on our savings until the banks recoup every cent that they lost, so I don't see how this is different from what was threatened in Crete - confiscation of a portion of all depositors' funds to make the banks there whole, except here in the U.S. it is happening slooooowly, so nobody complains of outright theft. But I digress.

Now to the film itself. It takes almost two hours to chart the history of Enron, from the beginning in the mid 80's to its sudden collapse in 2001. There are interviews with everyone involved with the company from accountants to regular employees, and like all Ponzi schemes, people might have had their doubts and suspicions, but nobody wanted to upset the money train especially if they are on that train. And like all Ponzi schemes Enron came to a sudden abrupt end when there was no way to hide the fact that all of the money and the profits were not real.

Also very interesting is the gladiator/macho corporate culture described, largely caused by COO Jeff Skilling waking up one day, realizing he was a nerd, and wanting to throw off that nerd persona. He lost weight, worked out, got Lasik done on his eyes, and began to organize adventure trips for himself and an inner circle of Enron executives, some of which involved actual bodily danger. He instituted an Enron employee ranking system in which employees were ranked from 1-5 and those in the lowest ranks were automatically terminated. It was the Billionaire Boys Club minus the murder and involving a much bigger club.

Of course, now the scandal looks almost quaint compared to what we've been living with since 2008.In 2005, when this film was made, such an implosion by a company that had been named "most innovative company" for six consecutive years by CEOs, 1996-2001, the last year being the year of Enron's collapse, was still quite the spectacle. The irony is that if Enron had collapsed in 2011 instead of 2001, I doubt anybody would have gone to jail. Heck, it might not have even been newsworthy except in Texas! Also, the company might have even received a federal bailout.

The highlight of the film for me - a video "Christmas card" to Ken Lay made by Enron execs in which they do a comedy sketch about "creative accounting" which turns out to be EXACTLY what the company was doing that hid their problems.