ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM (2006)

Cast

Plot

Yep you've got it, it's a casino, shares are a bit of paper whose value is whatever some other person'll give for it. Enron's 'chain letter' scheme blew bigger than any other bubble in corporate history, it involved salesmanship and false accounting, in co-operation with Arthur Andersen (who were the US's most prestigous accountants) creating huge and costly power blackouts in California, politically destroying the incumbent governor and Democrat presidential hopeful Gray Davis, in order to force up energy future prices. And, by cosying up to the Bush family, Ken Lay almost became Energy Secretary! As the share price was talked up, you, Joe Six-Pack, bought the lies and they, the master fraudsters, pocketed the cash. And the culture! The taped audio phone calls of the floor traders are most revealing, a whole corporate ethic of greed and fraud. My criticism - this is politically light-weight, there is no attempt to analyse Enron in terms of capitalism going wrong, and little attempt to see it in terms of America's fetishism of 'free market' policies.