Quotes About Enron

I think that the failures of Enron and WorldCom and other companies are partially failures of investors to recognize companies that are selling for a thousand times nothing, but chances are they may be worth only that.

Early 2000s, we get Enron, which tells us the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.

Enron Field in Houston, the Trans World Dome in St. Louis and PSINet Stadium in Baltimore are just three of the modern-day coliseums named for companies that have found new homes in bankruptcy court.

I take full responsibility for what happened at Enron. But saying that, I know in my mind that I did nothing criminal.

During the Enron debacle, it was workers who took the pounding, not bankers. Not only did Enron employees lose their jobs, many lost their retirement savings. That's because they were at the bottom of the investing food chain.

Lawyers have us trained to believe nothing is airtight, any agreement can be broken, and that life is one big loophole. A handshake ends up as meaningless as an Enron audit. Heaven forbid the law be the law. Today, the law is whatever the client wants it to be. Today, we can sue anybody over anything. We can ruin a reputation with a simple allegation, trumpeting the canard worldwide on the Internet in seconds.

There was loose talk of Enron management practices and reminders of a scandal at the University of Toronto, when a big donor corporation, Eli Lilly, was said to have vetoed the appointment of an academic who doubted the effectiveness of Prozac.

I happen to represent Enron here in Houston. We have many good corporate citizens here in Houston. Enron happened to have been one.

But indeed a market like California is not good for Enron.

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.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation's corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

If you look at the great frauds of all time, Enron had that phantom trading floor. What Herbalife has is it has phantom or fictitious customers.

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.

Was I believer in Enron Corporation? Yes, sir, I was.

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.

she suggested deleting senior Andersen partners from the circulation list for Enron e-mails because it "increases their likelihood of being a witness." Duncan

Skilling was the one Enron executive who did not take the Fifth Amendment before Congress, though his lawyer advised him to do so.

On January 30, 1992, the SEC told Enron that it would not object to the use of mark-to-market accounting beginning that year. On getting the word, Skilling was ecstatic. He quickly gathered his troops in the conference room of the thirty-first floor, where his group had its offices. To celebrate, he brought in champagne: champagne to toast an accounting change!

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America's young people, 'We be thugs.' The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.

Some members of Congress now are complaining they are underpaid. They want to propose a pay raise. You can't blame them. A lot of them took a big income hit when Enron folded.

The Houston Astros want to change the name of Enron Field where they play. I guess the Enron name could cause problems for them. Like players could steal a base and then deny it.

In 2001 came the announcement that shocked the corporate world. Enron—the corporate poster child, the company of the future—had gone belly-up. What happened? How did such spectacular promise turn into such a spectacular disaster? Was it incompetence? Was it corruption? It was mindset.

Ken Lay has, does and will continue to accept responsibility for the fall of Enron. He was the man at the controls. But failure is not a crime.