Lawbolisted Powerful

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Nessieldwi Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

classicalsteve If there is a main point to "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room", it's that intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing. Intelligence can be used for good or ill, and in this case, the smartest guys at Enron were bankrupt in the wisdom department. While for a time the executives' bank accounts may have contained millions, their judgments were in the red, and this bankruptcy of sagacity and prudence led to the downfall of their company. They were "smart" enough to cook Enron's books long enough to artificially raise their stock price for a time. However, in the end, they weren't smart enough to mold a business model which made legitimate profits. And the man who proclaimed himself as f-ing smart when he was at Harvard Business School, CEO Jeff Skilling, reveals himself to be the most morally bankrupt of them all. Skilling for all his "smartness" not only couldn't create a truly viable business, he was unwilling to own up to his mistakes. Avoiding the truth and hiding behind one's own lies is very stupid. "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is a thoroughly compelling documentary about one of the strangest episodes in US corporate theater. Enron for about 10 years, from circa 1990 to 2000, was the darling of Wall Street, perpetually convincing investors they could do no wrong. They continually posted earnings in areas where they had actually been losing millions. The goal of the executives of Enron became to keep the stock price of their company high regardless of actual performance. They found clever ways to hide losses, and if that's being "smart", they were definitely smart in spades. However, the piper eventually has to be paid, lest the piper will toot his horn and the town will have to pay a much higher price. In this case, the townspeople were all of Enron's investors aside from the "smartest" guys who cashed out before the ship sank.Skilling and the executives found an ingenious way to avoid paying the piper at least in the short term. They adopted what's referred to as "mark-to-market" accounting. Mark-to-market accounting is a tricky concept and essentially based on the idea that a party could reflect profits on a business transaction before the profits actually materialized. The numbers were based on current market values. For example, if a party bought a house for $100,000 and the current market price of the house was $500,000, the entity could show their net worth was $400,000 even though the party had not actually cashed in on the profit. Mark-to-market is used to evaluate stock portfolios. The challenge involved is that if the market fluctuates, in theory the transaction could be less profitable. Also, it's dangerous if the party uses mark to market in subjective areas. The executive's rationale was they should be able to reflect "profits" in mark to market simply because they had concocted a supposedly good business venture. However, Enron was showing profits in mark-to-market accounting for business deals which ultimately failed. One example explored in the documentary involved Enron's financing some power plants in India. However, they weren't smart enough to understand Indian economics. India's economy, because they are at best a second-world nation (some would argue a third-world nation) is not like that of the United States and Europe. Their currency is not worth what it is in the West, and India could never pay the high prices for energy Enron was expecting to charge them. The power plants Enron helped finance lay dormant. And yet, Enron cooked the books to show the deal with the power plants in India were already profitable because they "should be" profitable, based on the current market. It was as if they bought the house for $100,000, showed the house was worth $500,000, but in fact, their investment was a loss because they paid $100,000 into a house which couldn't be resold for anything. Another example was a supposed enterprise with Blockbuster Video for video/movie streaming on the internet. Enron claimed they had developed the technology and already had customers subscribing to the service, but in reality, nothing had come of it. Blockbuster Video, once a viable video rental enterprise, is now largely defunct having been displaced by video-on-demand technology developed and offered by Netflix, Comcast, and Amazon. Enron at one point "claimed" they had developed on-demand technology and were reflecting mark-to-market profits on their books for an enterprise which was essentially fabricated.As badly as Ken Lay and Andy Fastow are portrayed, the executive who appears the worst is Jeff Skilling. Despite mounting evidence that Skilling was right in the center of the fraud, he never comes clean. He never admits he didn't pay the piper. Ironically, his company was constantly playing "Survivor" in which 15% of the workforce was automatically laid off every year for sub-par performance. If this criteria was put on Skilling himself, he would have been fired. So many of Skilling's business ideas were either duds or failed to produce the desired results. Now Skilling is the smartest guy in prison, and Enron is history. If they were the smartest guys in the room, I'd really like to see who were the dumbest.

SlyGuy21 It's amazing how long people can keep a lie going, even though they know it'll eventually blow up in their faces. A company "too big to fail", and people "too greedy to care". If the story of Enron is an example of anything, it's an example of how the love of money can destroy your moral compass. I don't think these people were born money-hungry manipulators, but once they got the idea in their heads, they threw their morals out the window and only saw dollar signs. From creating fake companies to dump their debt into, to manipulating California's energy and creating a crisis that cost billions of dollars. At the end of the day, it was all about money, and nothing else. Hopefully this stands as an example to any would-be corporate criminals out there that think they can get away with stuff like this, because you may for awhile, but all your house of cards needs is a spark in order to go up in flames.

Dave Tedel Overall I found this to be a decent recap of the Enron saga, or at least the pre-trial portion thereof. However the film is necessarily simplistic, and there's a high dose of cable-documentary cheese (re- enacted funerals, gratuitous topless dancers, inappropriate Oingo Boingo songs, etc.) I have not read the McLean/Elkind book yet but just re-watched this DVD. A few of their interviewees are irrelevant (Kevin Phillips; a consumer watchdog person; the local priest). For some reason it is never explained that the blonde with the Merchant-Ivory accent arrived via Vinson Elkins, attorneys at law, although I think this is rather an important tidbit. With your average Mark Cuban production you could do far worse; I predict it will go over big with assistant professors of sociology in Santa Monica.Rolled my eyes at the part about The Milgram Experiment, but did get a good laugh when the narrator described Gray Davis as a "then-likely Presidential candidate"

cfs-907-920005 If you haven't seen it or haven't seen it recently, it's well worth watching. Systemic fraud -- accountants, lawyers, regulators, investment banks, etc: "complicity across the board", "all too easy", accounting gimics, Alan Greenspan connections to the company, con man extraordinaire dissection of Jeff Skilling, massive egos, greed, lack of ethics among execs, connections with Bush family and Gray Davis downfall, testimony before House and Senate -- all well laid out in this documentary few years before the financial crisis hit: "Enron gambled entire future on the idea that its stock price wouldn't fall." Same rationale repeated a few years later with real estate as substitute. Doesn't offer much confidence that same exact thing is happening again in some form, papering over the losses from the the credit crisis with something else...Warning though: your blood will be boiling by the end of it.