Part II

READING

Read the article, “Enron for Dummies.” Decide whether or not these statements are true or false. A statement may be both truth and false: be prepared to support your answer with references in the text. (Number your paragraphs before you read!)

1. Enron was an innovative corporation.

2. Enron was a finance company.

3. Throwing out Enron’s good ideas is like throwing out the baby with the bath water.

4. Enron was a huge success because its leaders knew how to run its huge variety of businesses profitably.

5. Enron was good at hiding its mistakes.

6. Enron made a considerable amount of money from its sale of Blockbuster profits to a Canadian bank.

7. Only the business press was skeptical about Enron’s success.

8. Enron did nothing illegal.

9. “Killer app” refers to all the new products and services which Enron invented and sold.

10. Pre-Enron, the energy industry was considered hopelessly old-fashioned and stodgy.

11. The loopholes that Enron took advantage of were available to all energy companies.

12. Enron was one hundred percent in favor of deregulation.

13. Like Chrysler, Enron is being rescued from financial disaster by the federal government.

14. Somebody will have to pay for the Enron fiasco, but it may not be Kenneth Lay, the CEO.

TEXT 1

ENRON FOR DUMMIIES by BILL KELLER (THE NEW YORK TIMES)

I saw this week that President Bush is ‘outraged’ by the Enron scandal, and I know I should be too, but there’s a lot I still don’t get. For starters, what kind of company is Enron, exactly?

Enron is a new-economy company, a thinking-outside-the-box, paradigm shifting, market-making company. In fact, it ranked as the most innovative company in America four years in a row, as judged by envious corporate peers in the annual Fortune magazine poll. It is also, at this point in time, a bankrupt company.

I meant, what does Enron do?

“Do?” Ah, a quaint old-economy question. You’re probably one of those people who like the new no-cell­-phone cars on Amtrak. Enron does a lot of things, but mainly it buys and sells energy.

What’s so innovative about that?

When Enron got started, natural gas and electricity were produced, transmitted and sold by state-regulated monopolies. They were often plodding and inefficient. Enron used Wall Street magic to transform energy supplies into financial instruments that could be traded online like stocks and bonds. These contracts guaranteed customers a steady supply at a predictable price. This may be a good place to pause for an Enron Lesson. The company did stupid and venal things, but introducing the laws of supply and demand into the energy system was smart business and is, by and large, good for customers. One sad side effect of this scandal is that some good ideas may be discredited by association with Enron.

So where did Enron go wrong?

As often happens with buccaneering entrepreneurs, it got a case of hubris. It figured if it could trade energy, it could trade anything, any­where, in the new virtual market­place. Newsprint. Television advertising time. Insurance risk. High-speed data transmission. All of these were converted into contracts – called derivatives – that were sold to investors. Enron poured billions into these trading ventures, and some failed. It turned out Enron was good at inventing businesses, but terrible at the tedious work of running them, judging by some appalling internal management audits discov­ered by The Times Kurt Eichenwald. For a time, Enron swept its failures into creative hiding places, but ultimately the truth came out, confidence in the company collapsed and you now have a feeding frenzy.

How did it hide its mistakes?

To keep its mystique alive and its stock price growing, it set up partnerships where it could bury its losses, or generate imaginary revenues. Here’s one of the more audacious examples, pieced together by The Wall Street Journal: Enron in­vested a bunch of money in a joint venture with Blockbuster to rent out movies online. The deal flopped eight months later. But in the meantime Enron had secretly set up a partnership with a Canadian bank. The bank essentially lent Enron $115 million in exchange for Enron’s profits from the movie venture over its first 10 years. The Blockbuster deal never made a penny, but Enron counted the Canadian loan as a nice, fat profit.

Um, I'm not sure I follow that…

Neither did the Canadian bank, which now holds a lot of worthless Enron i.o.u.’s. Enron also seems to have baffled the accountants at Arthur Andersen, the bankers at j. P. Morgan, the Wall Street geniuses who touted Enron stock, and those C.E.O.’s who kept voting Kenneth Lay, now abruptly retired, the mas­termind of the year. Also (with some exceptions) the business press.

Did Enron break the rules?

Whether it broke the law is yet to be determined. Various prosecutors are undoubtedly reviewing the statutes on accounting fraud, insider trading and illegal destruction of documents, among other crimes. But rules were for sissies. These were invincible innovators, who sneered at rules. In that, respect, they were the quintessential 90’s company.

What's that supposed to mean?

The company embodied the get-obscenely-rich-quick cult that grew up around the intersection of digital technology, deregulation and globalization. It rode the Zeitgeist of speed, hype, novelty and swagger. Petroleum was hopelessly uncool; deriva­tives were hot. Companies were ad­vised to unload the baggage of hard assets, like factories or oilfields, which hold you back in the digital long jump, and concentrate on buzz and brand. Accountants who tried to impose the traditional discipline of the balance sheet were dismissed as “bean-counters,” stuck in the old metrics. Wall Street looked to new metrics, new ways of measuring the intangible genius of innovation, and the most important metrics were the daily flickers of your stock price. Above all, everyone was looking for the killer app.

“Killer app?”

You are clueless. The killer application was the world-beating opportunity. (Mr. Lay called that Blockbuster deal “the killer app for the entertainment in­dustry.”) As often as not, the killer app was not a new product or service, but a beautiful loophole. In the new-economy best, seller “Unleashing the Killer App,” the first example is a guy who realizes that gas stations in Germany are exempt from the country’s rigid early-closing laws for most stores. Voila! German gas stations become virtual shopping malls. By the way, in the 90’s, expressions like “killer app” were widely believed to have an aphrodisiac effect.

So it was about sex, after all?

Oh, absolutely. Wall Street was the new Hollywood, risk was the new testosterone, Lou Dobbs was Leonar­do DiCaprio. Accountants called themselves consultants and bought Miata convertibles. And how cool was Enron? About two years ago a Fortune magazine writer likened utilities and energy companies to “a hunch of old fogies and their wives shuffling around halfheartedly to the not-so-stirring sounds of Guy Lom­bards... Suddenly young Elvis comes crashing through the sky­light.” In this metaphor, the guy in the skin-tight gold-lame suit was En­ron. The writer left out the part where Elvis eats himself to death.

That reminds me, is it true what they say about the name "Enron"?

Mr. Lay wanted to call it Enteron, until they realized that was a biology term for the digestive tract. In hindsight, Enteron seems right for a com­pany of such ungoverned appetites. Though I prefer my wife’s name for the company. End Run.

Did Enron buy political influence?

Please. That’s not the way things work in Washington. Enron bought access. Money just got it in the door to make its case. (The case it made probably went something like this: If the government does things Enron’s way a lot of people will get very rich and they will be very, very grateful to the wise leaders who made it all possible.) If you're asking whether the Bush administration did favors for Enron, sure it did – and so, by the way, did the Clinton administration, and both parties in Congress. Atten­tion has focused on a number of fasci­nating loopholes lawmakers and reg­ulators secretly customized for En­ron. But – and here’s another Enron Lesson – most of what Washington contributed to the glory of Enron it did in plain sight. Politicians demonized government regulation, and me­thodically dismantled the safeguards set up in previous downturns to pro­tect little investors. They promoted the cult of stock-market speculation, even calling for Social Security funds to be fed to Wall Street, They cut taxes and all but stopped auditing tax returns. I’d say Enron’s campaign donations, about $6 million over the past dozen years, paid off better than most of its other investments.

Isn't that what free markets are all about – getting government out of the way?

Yes and no. Free-marketers be­lieve in reducing regulation. Enron believed in reducing regulation of En­ron. Enron was perfectly capable of lobbying for the federal government to take over the electric power grid from the states – hardly a free-market position, but one that would have made life easier for Enron. It lobbied for tighter regulation of air pollution, because it had figured a way to make money trading emission credits. And at the end Enron sure seemed to be fishing for a bailout. More important, a central tenet of capitalism is that people who run companies are subject to the discipline of the marketplace, as meted out by the shareholders. That can’t work if the shareholders are lied to about the condition of the company. Another Enron Lesson: The louder someone yells “free markets!” the closer you want to look at his files (assuming they have not been shredded).

But the administration didn't bail out Enron at the end, right?

No, the administration declined to climb aboard that sinking ship. A final Enron Lesson: When business and politics meet, Kenny Boy, it’s not a relationship, it’s a transaction.

What happens now?

A witch hunt, of course. In the end, with any luck, Congress will stop some of the money sloshing around the political system, and restore a bit of law and order to the wild frontier. But first, a few burnings at the stake. My wise friend Floyd Norris says there’s a basic law of the market: When you get rich, it's because you’re smart. When you get poor, it’s because somebody cheated you. Just as Enron embodied the stock-market delirium on the way up, it will, now that the euphoria is over, be the scapegoat for all those smooth talkers who convinced us dummies that we could be rich.

Scan the text to find the words closest in meaning to the following words.

1. expose

2. charmingly old-fashioned

3. rigid and slow-moving

4. unscrupulous

5. tainted

6. freewheeling

7. pride and arrogance

8. shocking

9. a free for all

10. produce income _____________________

11. failed

12. a promise to pay back money

13. confuse

14. praised and promoted ______________________

15. confuse

16. cowards ______________________

17. typical ______________________

18. a person with old-fashioned ideas

19. great excitement

Make the word formation if possible

NOUN	VERB	ADJACTIVE	ADVERB
		bankrupt
audit
	to lobby

Explain the meaning of the following idioms, puns and words with prepositions

to sweep something under the rug, bean counter, witch hunt, burning at the stake, smooth talker, in plain sight, an end run, bail out, a bailout, sneer at, mete out, downturn, upturn.

WATCHING AND DISCUSSING

ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM