Whats the significance of the Enron scandal and collapse for the markets as a whole?
Is this symptomatic of something larger? I think the Enron scandal is symptomatic of something much broader than Enron. I think it’s symptomatic of a breakdown of the ethical values of business over a period of perhaps 20 years, a gradual erosion of business ethics that brought us to an Enron, but might very well bring us to a whole host of Enrons as we move down the road. … [In 1998] you made a speech up in New York in which you used the terms “abuses,” “trickery,” and “accounting hocus-pocus.” Are things that bad? I think they are. I think that the seduction of the boards of companies that are intended to protect investors … the nexus between the accounting firms and the corporations, and the aggressive attitudes of CFOs and CEOs, has created a pattern of deception; that has created a situation which has eroded public confidence in the sanctity of the numbers which is the basis of our markets today. … What’s at stake here? … If investors lose confidence in the reliability of
