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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (14440)2/4/2002 8:37:35 PM
From: LLCF  Respond to of 74559
 
< Did they like their customers, shareholders and business associates and wish them to do well? I suspect not.>

The ultimate law... 'intention'

DAK



To: Maurice Winn who wrote (14440)2/4/2002 9:27:05 PM
From: Raymond Duray  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 74559
 
maurice,

Re: Enron seems to have been purely a 'get the dosh' investment and business. Did they like their customers, shareholders and business associates and wish them to do well***? I suspect not.

Professor Frank Partnoy, who is helping the Senate Government Affairs Committee to understand derivatives:

321gold.com

wrote an eye-opening book call F.I.A.S.C.O. a few years ago. It described his career at Morgan Stanley's Fixed Income Division, writing derivatives contracts. One day Dr. Partnoy overheard a conversation with a derivatives salesman taking to a customer, a treasurer of a mid-sized Midwestern insurance company, explaining the footnotes in a previously signed hedging contract and explaining to the treasurer exactly how it was that he had lost $7 MM in two days on the devaluation of the Thai baht, which wasn't a currency that the treasurer though he'd involved himself with is a yen-dollar contract. Alas, the footnote on page 17 indicated otherwise. After sympathizing with the man who was about to lose his job, and his career, he ***"wished him well". Partnoy, who'd overheard only bits and pieces of the conversation asked the trader what was up. The trader casually said, "Oh, I just ripped his face off."

-Ray



To: Maurice Winn who wrote (14440)2/4/2002 11:08:06 PM
From: AC Flyer  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 74559
 
Mq:

I subscribe to the chimpoid school of human behavior. I'll go one step further and say that you can explain all of human behavior in terms of what is evolutionarily favorable and what is not. This gets most fascinating when you explore reproductive behavior, but that would be a wild tangent so I'll leave it alone for now.

I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that almost everyone who reaches the top of a large public company (with the exception of the founders of same, and even many of them) is in some way or another a lowlife. This is so, imo, because open-minded, even-handed, altruistic behavior just does not cut the mustard in the take-no-prisoners political battleground that is the typical corporation. What is far worse, imo, is that humans, for the most part, will not follow open-minded, even-handed, altruistic leaders. We chimpoids voluntarily choose to elevate large, loud, testosterone-soaked apes. I think that the root of this is that we understand that when we put a large, loud, testosterone-soaked ape at the head of our ape troop, they are OUR large, loud, testosterone-soaked ape and will scare the bejesus out of the apes in the next valley.