Word: enronizing
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...Bill Clinton's chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission use the same sweeping adjective to describe a situation, you know they're talking about something serious. Testifying before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee last week, Arthur Levitt, former head of the SEC, identified the Enron affair with "an emerging crisis of systemic confidence in our markets." Three days earlier, Robert L. Bartley had written in the Journal of the "systemic failure" at the root of the matter, one that touched "Directors suspending their ethical guidelines... Accountants and lawyers studiously looking the other way... Wall Street analysts failing in their...
...sense that Enron represents the failure of a system, not just of a Texas oil-and-gas-and-cybertrading company, that gives the case its weight. In capitalism's 700-year history, financial scandals are two a penny. As detailed in Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, some of them had far more devastating impacts than Enron's collapse ever will. John Law's Mississippi Co., for example, bankrupted 18th century France, until Law was chased out of Paris and songs were sung in the streets advocating "the application of all his notes...
Dick Cheney has taken a hard line against the General Accounting Office, refusing its efforts to get information on meetings held by his energy task force. Critics suspect that Cheney is stonewalling to conceal the Administration's links with bankrupt energy giant Enron. But Cheney may be hiding more than that. Several other energy companies had opportunities to influence the Administration's energy policy, with both persuasion and money...
...long been a tenet of pro-business Republicanism that no one ought to be making that decision for them. Which is why George W. Bush, unfurling Friday his proposed changes in the nation's 401(k) laws that will supposedly prevent Enron from ever happening again (and Bush from paying any more for it politically), did not propose that employees be limited in how much of their company's stock they can hold in their account. (What if it happens to a good investment?) It's also why the things Bush is proposing are, to put it mildly, rather mild...
...Bush may be trying to eventually turn Social Security into something like a 401(k) plan, but not even the Enron mess is going to scare him into turning 401(k)s into something like Social Security. Nobody in Congress is moaning about the employees who signed up at a dot-com for salary-plus-150,000-stock-options and lost it all when the stock ceased to exist - what's so different about Enron? That company's employees joined a high-flyer and apparently bet it all on high-flying company stock. The company failed - and either none...