Meanwhile, Phillip Winn’s wondering why we are all so focused on Enron.
Aside II:I’ll get his name right given enough iterations.
Aside: I got Phillip’s name wrong. And coming back to this entry I realized why: Steve Winwood. My brain must have been listening to “The Low Spark of the High Heeled Boys” when I was typing that. Sorry about that.
- The accounting and audit problems that brought down Enron may not be localized to a bunch of yahoos from Houston, and Arthur Andersen. It’s hard to run a market economy that depends on public ownership of companies for financing in those circumstances.
- The Bush administration screamed integrity from the rooftops during the campaign. Unless Bush and Cheney were having prayer meetings with Enron executives, there seems to be some there there.
- I understand that Conservatives think that a blow job from a jewish girl is much more evil than defrauding investors, but the rest of us worry about bigger things.
Okay, #3 was harsh. Point taken.
Meanwhile, Phillip’s responded to my response, and now I’m getting where he’s coming from. I’ll agree that the number of congressional hearings seems closely correlated with the fact that it’s an election year. And I don’t put much stock (pardon the pun) in what you can get out of a hearing (aside from lots of TV).
But those same legislators are going to be the ones who either come up with the rules, or direct the SEC to come up with the rules concerning audit, etc, in the post Enron world.
So I still think there’s a justifiable focus on Enron — and on Global Crossing, and Critical Path as well. Enron’s fall was much larger than those other firms, and it makes it more mediagenic. And even the Economist has been leading with Enron the last two out of three weeks, and their focus has been on the accounting issues which I think is the core story. (I’d link to indvidual articles but you need to be a subscriber. Why aren’t you one?)
My cynical take on this is that all the attention Congress is lavishing on the matter won’t result in any good.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on if Bush is a man of integrity.
As for the links between Bush and Enron, I think they are worth investigating. Even if there was no wrong-doing, it’s notable that Lay and company were able to fool the leader of the free world (well him and everyone else it seems.)
One last thing on the Enron hearings. I agree with Phillip that we shouldn’t be creating artificial limits on where people can stick their 401(k) contributions.
