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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerome who wrote (10232)	2/11/2002 11:23:34 AM
From: chomolungma	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10921

Do you expect Mr Lay, Fastow and Skilling to go to an ordinary prison where they mingle with and educate the lower classes on obtaining wealth without violence? Let me play the devil’s advocate here for a minute. Why are we all of a sudden assuming these men are guilty? And if they are, what crime did they commit? As I read the story, the first thing they were criticized on was insider trading. This should be something quite easy to prove or disprove. If someone was selling shares of Enron when they had material non-public information, then they are guilty of insider trading. But since management always has material some material non-public information, then we just have to find if they followed the rules laid out for them. Personally, I don’t know, and I don’t care. Insider trading cases are hardly the stuff congressional investigations are made of unless there are political points to score. The next thing the press is screaming about is that Enron management enriched themselves by setting up partnerships and cutting sweetheart deals with themselves. Despicable? You know it! I’ve seen this before and it makes me sick. It is not isolated to Enron. Is it illegal? I don’t know, it may well have been. But establishing guilt is not as simple as “doesn’t that make you sick, these guys should be in jail.” There are lots of things that managements do that make me sick and most of these don’t land them in jail. Then there is the pension debacle. Management is criticized for not telling their employees to get out of their Enron stock before it collapsed. This is just silly. If management had, at any time, told anyone that the stock was in jeopardy of collapsing, the stock would have immediately collapsed. What’s even sillier is that there is the assumption that fortunes could have been saved by early warning. Don’t they realize that if someone sold the stock, someone bought it? No fortunes could have been saved, only the losses shifted. Related to the above, is the notion that management was saying positive things when problems were known. What a shock that management was overly positive! I’ve never heard of such a thing. And if they had told everything that in hindsight they should have, then the stock would have dropped before all those who said they would have gotten out “if only we had known” could have gotten out anyway. The press seems to want the public to think that bankrupting a company is a crime. It isn’t. The press wants us to think that poor managements that hurt innocent people should be put in jail. The jails would burst! Without ruling out the possibility that Enron management is indeed guilty of breaking laws in any of the above and will see jail time, I think that the primary reason that Enron failed will be found to be because there were too many risks taken with too much debt and those risks sunk the company. This is a story that has been repeated many times in and is nothing new. Yes, the accounting system is twisted to hide this stuff. We’ve known that this has happened in many businesses for years! Yes, there were greedy and stupid people behind the mess who should’ve known better. But, the simple story is that a company took risky bets and lost. You will never outlaw that.