Quotes from Bethany McLean

Home ownership was the fig leaf for the rise in subprime lending. But that was really about cash-out refinancings, not buying homes.

Fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in isolation, without looking at the big picture, would be short-sighted.

When Warren Buffett invests in a company, he is conferring upon that company something very unique: his credibility.

Going to work every day was like my hair was on fire and all I had to put it out was a hammer.

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white.

Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history.

No city embraced privatization more eagerly than Chicago, where I live.

Proponents of privatization argued that cities and states needed private capital to fund all the upgrades that our decaying infrastructure so desperately needed.

Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.

The big banks advise cities about whether privatization is a wise choice. They also control the ability of states and cities to access the market for their financing needs.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

Figuring out whether a deal was worth doing was nothing if not an exercise in calculating risk: did the size of the potential return justify the risk of all the things that could go wrong? That's a question that every executive at every company has to be willing to tackle. A company that lacked the

Everything was perception; nothing was real.

Those who want to blame all of Enron's woes on the greedy former CFO claim that Enron was a good business brought down by Andy Fastow. But that was never true. Ultimately, Enron was a bad business that was, for a time, propped up by Andy Fastow.

Never, ever do the easy wrong instead of the harder right.

The tale of Enron is a story of human weakness, of hubris and greed and rampant self-delusion; of ambition run amok; of a grand experiment in the deregulated world; of a business model that didn't work; and of smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last disaster—and who couldn't admit they were wrong.

People also felt that a great crime had been committed, yet there was not going to be a great punishment.

Back in those less complicated times, there were lots of industries that operated more or less by rote: the old banker's motto, for instance, was "3-6-3": take money in at 3 percent, lend it out at 6 percent, and be on the golf course by 3 P.M.

McKinsey partners tend to be designers of ditches, not diggers of ditches. When it comes to executing their lofty theories, well, consultants lean toward leaving those messy realities to the companies themselves.

He once gave a speech advising anyone who wanted to complete a power project to "get all the lawyers in one room, then shoot 'em—in the mouth, because it's impossible to miss.

Securitizations exploded, with everything from lotto winnings to proceeds from tobacco lawsuits being turned into securities that could be sold to the investing public.

What's good for the financial industry probably isn't good for you.

Muckleroy began to hear from friends in the business, as he later recalled, "that we were huge on the wrong side of a trade." But so unconcerned were the Enron brass that at the company's mid-August board meeting, the Enron board increased Borget's trading limits by 50 percent. One skeptical Enron executive who attended that meeting returned to his office and told a colleague: "The Enron board believes in alchemy.

Going to work every day was like my hair was on fire and all I had to put it out was a hammer.