One of the interesting aspects of the Enron scandal is the different strategies the chief villains have employed to exculpate themselves.
Kenneth Lay, the former chairman of the bankrupt energy trader, has decided he can plausibly cast himself as a stupid person taken advantage of by brighter underlings. Jeffrey Skilling, the chief executive who quit before the final collapse, believes he can set himself up as the guy who wasn't around when anything bad happened and who "got off in Ireland" before the ship went down.
Andrew Fastow, the chief financial officer who profited from partnerships with Enron Corp, clearly thinks if he lays low like Brer Rabbit, the public inquiry will focus on other, more senior people and bigger, more systematic problems -- and that he will be allowed to play the role of an underling who was simply doing what his bosses told him to do.
Implicit in each strategy is a rejection of the other two.
Had any two of these men collaborated on their stories, they might have been able to transfer the blame to the third. As it is, each has created a defense that more or less lays the fault for what happened at the feet of the other two.
Although none of their poses is even faintly plausible to a close reader of the news, they throw up enough smoke to cloud the view and dissuade casual observers, at least for a bit, from seeing just how culpable all three men must be.
In short, all three of the chief villains are playing the same game as defendants that they did as businessmen. Their strategies are to public relations what Enron's books were to investor relations.
Of course none of the three men would view his own behavior so cynically. Villains never see themselves as villains. People who behave badly tell themselves a story to make themselves feel better. I'll bet the story all three men tell themselves is more or less the same -- and very different from the story they are presenting to the public. It runs something like this: ``Sure, I knew what was going on. Sure, I was responsible. So what? I was only, in a sense, following orders.
``Enron came of age as a company at a time when the market rewarded, nay demanded, grand illusions. We who ran the place practiced a bit of creative accounting, hiding debt as equity, and booking notional future profits as real current ones. The market did not merely allow us to do this; it encouraged us to do this. Indeed, to one degree or another, everyone we knew was doing it.
Everyone we did business with knew what we were doing.
``So we kept doing it, and the market loved it. Our actions made a lot of people -- shareholders, employees, customers, charities, politicians, bankers, the Houston Astros -- very happy.
``And then something changed: the mood in the air. One day perceptions created their own reality. The next, reality bridled at the association. One day everyone wanted to view us as a great success. The next, they began to question us, in new and disturbing ways.
"The creative accounting for which we had been so amply rewarded -- and which, as I say, had made so many people so happy for so long -- meant that we had become highly leveraged, and vulnerable to our creditors. When their mood shifted, these fickle friends for whom we had done so much staged a run on our bank. Why? We were doing nothing different from what we'd always done. We didn't change; the world did."
It's pretty clear that all three men feel self-righteous.
They see themselves not as villains but as victims of the market's hypocrisy. That is why they are able to lie with such conviction now -- why Kenneth Lay can send his wife out to tell people that he is broke, and why Skilling can lecture Congressional investigators on public morality. They feel their own pain. And they blame us for it.
Michael Lewis, whose books include Next: The Future Just Happened and Liar's Poker, is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the