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Title: What Went Wrong at Enron: Everyone's Guide to the Largest Bankruptcy in U.S. History by Peter C. Fusaro, Ross M. Miller ISBN: 0-471-26574-8 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 21 June, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (25 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Thin
Comment: Let's start with the positives:
- the book is easy to read and reasonably well written;
- the basic facts of the story are covered;
- the book starts the story way back before the problems emerged so that you get a feel for what the business was up to.
But
- it is very short book for such a complex subject
- the "unravelling" - the investigations into "what went wrong" are (ironically) not well covered
- there is almost no coverage of the Andersen issues
So save your dollar, pound, euro or yen - don't waste it on this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Shakespearean tragedy
Comment: What really went wrong at Enron?
A question that cannot be answered easily due to its nature of complexity. Thousands and hundreds investors, including Enron¡¦s employees who vested their retirement benefits in the s401k plan solely with Enron shares¡K..The horrible downfall alarmed the investment community, hurt the professional society (accountant, lawyer, underwriter etc.) and credibility of the monitoring commission¡K. The U.S. government reacted with the new legislation (Sabanes-Oxley Act) as an ¡§attempt¡¨ to tackle the problem, trying to put the company¡¦s management back on track to shoulder its fiduciary duty to the company¡¦s shareholder. But, does it work? The extent to which the various parties¡¦ responsibilities is still clouded.
If we do not really analyze the root causes which led to the Enron¡¦s downfall, we never know the answer. This book, written with the targeted general audience, is published at the right time to give the public a good chance to find the ashes in the smoke. At least for the moment.
According to this book, the tragedy was played by an arrogant CEO, greedy senior executive, loyal whistleblower, with the backdrop of a wrongly conceived free economy principle. The book is well written and gives insightful analyses based on the available evidence and traces. Some of the factors leading to the tragedy noted by the authors are:
*X The use of SPE (Special Purpose Vehicles) in accounting to keep off the accounting profits as well as to hide the potential liabilities
*X The constantly fearing environment built by the Corporate Culture emphasizing on a sense of urgency
*X Over-extension of operations in the deregulated energy and telecommunication market
*X Mark-to-market accounting principles
*X Less than full company¡¦s disclosure tendency
*X Valuation problem of customized contracts
* Making commitment as a counter-party to every trade in arbitrage markets
*X Trading from natural gas to electricity to bandwidth to 1800 different products in the Enron online
*X Conflicting company¡¦s strategy: asset-lite vs. debt heavy financed investments
*X Manipulated earning estimated to meet expectations
*X Deals financed by high Enron¡¦s stock price
*X Excessive investment in optic fibre networks
The list could go on and on. In fact, Enron went to the extent that deals were made just for the sake of making them. The more you read about the book, the more you feel it is a Shakespearean tragedy ¡V things are certain to get worse with all of these interrelated factors playing on stage. The general audience, those who believed that the play had a good ending, bought the tickets but found that the play was ultimately turn out to be a tragic one. They suffered. However, the director said: ¡§You bought the tickets because you believed in the play had a good ending. I didn¡¦t say that it would end in that way.¡¨ Refund? No.
The investigation into Enron¡¦s alleged sham trading and potential fraud scheme is still in progress as of this writing¡K..I highly recommend the book to the general readers, although it is better if you are financially literate. It is a thought-provoking and interesting read, especially to the CPAs.
Rating: 3
Summary: Lacks specifics, too many pointless analogies.
Comment: Enron's greed and financial scandals, along with the rise and fall, are interesting in itself. This book, though it does explain the fall and is easily readable, isn't intriguing enough to capture the reader's attention. In fact, more than half is a description of how Enron came to be and what there business model is. A chunk of the book is just photocopied evidence pasted in the appendix. Only a minute section describes the scandal and accounting frauds.
The author loves anologies. He devotes pages to baseball card trading, and then sort of compares it to Enron's business. While these analogies help with understanding the business model, it's often over-simplified with a glaring lack of details. What I found was a lack of hard numbers and statistics which meant I couldn't put the failings into perspective. Also, the first half of the book where he details Enron, he seems to be praising their business, then hand wavingly, he points to a few corrupted examples. It almost appears that the author thinks Enron would still be a powerhouse if it wasn't for a few specific incidents.
As a book, it gets the job done. It shows the errors of Enron in a way that any non financial person could understand. It does tend to oversimplify, and it's glaring lack of numbers and details hurt it in the end.
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Title: Enron: The Rise and Fall by Loren Fox ISBN: 0471237604 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 20 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron by Sherron Watkins, Mimi Swartz ISBN: 0385507879 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth from an Enron Insider by Brian Cruver ISBN: 0786710934 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind ISBN: 1591840082 Publisher: Portfolio Pub. Date: 13 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Final Accounting : Ambition, Greed and the Fall of Arthur Andersen by Barbara Ley Toffler, Jennifer Reingold ISBN: 0767913825 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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