I did not work for Enron - not even close.

It affected me because it made my bosses suddenly realize that they could potentially go to jail.

Business suddenly became a lot easier to conduct.

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if your stock was overinflated, did you really lose THAT much? obviously your initial investment, but i laugh when i hear people talking about losing X amount and X is some hugely overinflated BS number that was giving them unreal returns.

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inflated or not, it was trading at it's value...seems to me that is pretty much the equivalent of losing that absolute dollar value...whether the stock should have been there or not, it was.

I invested a decent amount of money in Enron, relatively speaking for me at the time...with the blessing of my old school, conservative money manager. Up in a cloud of smoke.

I had to take a one hour ethics class at Mays.

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if your stock was overinflated, did you really lose THAT much? obviously your initial investment, but i laugh when i hear people talking about losing X amount and X is some hugely overinflated BS number that was giving them unreal returns.

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What an ignorant statement. If you're working for a company and a good part of your salary is based in stock options, then you certainly did lose THAT much. Enron's ESOP program was where the majority of employees lost their money.

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You had people who took huge 401k balances that were previously in a nice balanced set of mutual funds and consciously moved it into a very fast growth company's stock so your risk level change tremendously. For this risk many people were reward with very high returns for several years (see Lou Pai), but then the bottom fell out. I don’t know why someone would put all their eggs in one high-risk basket for retirement – it’s not like we were talking about “play” money

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I had a couple of buddies that did just that, moved all their money from mutual funds to Enron stock.
Makes me sick in my stomach when they told me how much they lost.

I am really grateful I never did move my money out of the mutual funds.

you lost your initial investment, whatever that may be. read my initial post.

i'm talking about people saying they lost X amount, its peak price, when that price and those gains were driven by fraudulent activity. it was all good when it helping them, but as soon as the well ran dry, they were "duped."

those gains were artificially created...while the price on the market, which we now know was/is heavily manipulated by shady activity, may have been high, its pretty clear the numbers didn't add up to the value.

bottom line: you lost your initial investment, in whatever manner that may have occurred whether it be via ESOP, stock options, etc. but when people start valuing their losses to include exhorbitant gains fueled by bull****, i really can't help but almost laugh. hypocrisy at its best.

nm...not worth the argument

you're the enlightened one.

[This message has been edited by Diggity (edited 7/9/2009 1:17p).]

I think people are probably looking at it 2 different ways. I'm not quite sure how their ESOP worked, but if you could have exercised/sold those options at any certain date, then I can certainly see someone claiming more than their initial investment, because they could have exercised them at that high point before they went to sh-t. However, if we're talking about vesting restrictions then I don't see people claiming much more than their initial vesting price. Either way its pretty significant especially being that a lot of employees probably made well under market salary due to those attractive high priced stock options that Enron threw at them upon hiring. Just my 2 cents.

[This message has been edited by David_Puddy (edited 7/9/2009 1:28p).]

i would have to look at it as the max cash i could have received if exercised at the peak time.

if my 401k takes a massive hit...just because it is still worth as much as my personal contribution does not mean that i have not taken a financial hit.

[This message has been edited by RaginKajun (edited 7/9/2009 2:02p).]

Agree w/ the coonass from Aransas Pass.

I got offered a job with ole Lou a while back hawking those very emission credits. They're in the Comerica bank building in Sugarland.

Very bright guys... strangest set of interviews I've ever had.

I didn't accept.

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They're in the Comerica bank building in Sugarland.

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I think you're thinking about Amerex, which is a different operation as far as I know.

I interviewed with them after college and it was what they called a "fit interview". It basically consisted of getting hazed by a bunch of Type A *****s who thought they were masters of the universe.

Not for me.

Nope - Element Markets, we still work with them.

[This message has been edited by Huktaz04 (edited 7/9/2009 4:09p).]

that's funny.

I didn't realize they had two different emissions trading firms in the same building.

Please, by all means, enlighten me.

I buy stock for $1/share. Fraudulent accounting and business practices push it to $10/share. When it crashes, I cry and ***** b/c the same fraudulent bull**** that pushed up and created value that was NEVER there, brought it back down and ***** about losing $9 and what that cheat CEO cost me.

Please tell me you can’t see the hypocrisy in this. Like I said, I understand losing your initial investment and being upset, WHATEVER THAT MAY BE, but including these gains that have proven to have been driven by a catalyst of faulty and intentionally shady ways of business and then crying about fraud taking away the same gains they created…like I said, its laughable.

This is from this sole perspective. I completely agree that freezing funds and not allowing sales from 401Ks and whatnot is complete BS. On that same note, obviously the job losses are very legit and very sad to see. I’m only addressing the above situation.

I went to grad school with one of the girls that posed in Playboy. Was always good for a chuckle when that picture would make it around e-mails or show up somewhere else.

I never knew her that well but she always seemed really nice.

You do realize that employees were still buying plenty of stock at $70 & $80/share right? In hindsight this seems foolish, but they believed in the company.

You act as if Enron had no value for the first 30 years of existence, which is just not true.

Of course there were many shady things found out later that did drive the price up.

There were also some very innovative things going on at the company. There were just too many greedy people at the helm out to line their own pockets.

The rank and file at the company truly bought into the culture, which is evident by them buying up stock right until the end.

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I buy stock for $1/share. Fraudulent accounting and business practices push it to $10/share. When it crashes, I cry and ***** b/c the same fraudulent bull**** that pushed up and created value that was NEVER there, brought it back down and ***** about losing $9 and what that cheat CEO cost me.

Please tell me you can’t see the hypocrisy in this. Like I said, I understand losing your initial investment and being upset, WHATEVER THAT MAY BE, but including these gains that have proven to have been driven by a catalyst of faulty and intentionally shady ways of business and then crying about fraud taking away the same gains they created…like I said, its laughable.

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This is simply a laughable argument. That's like saying that you have no right to be upset or mad when your home value took a hit after the credit bubble burst because the gains weren't real. It isn't hypocritical in the least.

That said, as I mentioned earlier, especially with former employees, while some fingers need to be pointed at the execs in charge at Enron, make sure to remember those fingers pointing back at you for not diversifying your portfolio and not doing more due diligence or questioning of your investments and what the company was actually doing. I read somewhere that shortly before Enron collapsed, something like 80% of the employees surveyed working there were unable to identify how their job actually incorporated into the greater business function of Enron... that's just scary to me and should have been a redlight to so many people.

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something like 80% of the employees surveyed working there were unable to identify how their job actually incorporated into the greater business function of Enron

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I would have had trouble answering that very question with many of my past jobs.

I'm a people person dammit!!!!!

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This is simply a laughable argument. That's like saying that you have no right to be upset or mad when your home value took a hit after the credit bubble burst because the gains weren't real. It isn't hypocritical in the least.

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so the gains from the fraud are ok...just not good if you get caught?

got it.

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You do realize that employees were still buying plenty of stock at $70 & $80/share right? In hindsight this seems foolish, but they believed in the company.

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these were the same idiots buying $1mill 2br townhomes in danville, ca.

not diversifying is always foolish.

I spent the summer of '90 working in the Enron natural gas field at Bammel. Met a lot of good, hard working blue collar workers who already had 15-30 years in and had no plans to leave. I thought about them quite a bit when the shiite hit the fan and how most of them probably lost everything.

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I read somewhere that shortly before Enron collapsed, something like 80% of the employees surveyed working there were unable to identify how their job actually incorporated into the greater business function of Enron

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Our CAO at my current company was looking to move out of public accounting at a manager level at the time of the rapid Enron growth. She said she inquired on a job at Enron and they couldn't/wouldn't even tell her what job they would inteview her for but they had a lot of good accounting jobs and were looking for high performers, etc. They could never define job responsibilities or titles which seems really odd. Luckily, she passed and came to work for us.

There is no doubt their braintrust at many levels was second to none from the folks I know they hired but things like this should have sign they were a little out of control.

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so the gains from the fraud are ok...just not good if you get caught?

got it.

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Right... that's what I'm saying. (idiot)

In real life, when somebody makes an investment, they expect a positive return. When they don't receive it, they are going to be a little upset. What happened to many Enron investors is that they were completely not informed of their investments. I'd call that ignorance and not hyprocricy.

When I trade and I sell out of a commodity after a price drop, I look at what I potentially could have earned if I sold at the peak value. I do so so I better understand when to buy and sell in the future on that particular commodity. It is stupid to call this hypocrisy and I doubt seriously that when you sold out of equity positions last year if you even had any (judging by your comments above, I sort of doubt that you did), you said 'Well, I could have made more money if I sold at the end of 2007, but you know what? I'm not upset because a lot of it was artificial money.'

nm, not worth it.

[This message has been edited by RaginKajun (edited 7/11/2009 12:33p).]

my uncle worked for enron in the accouting dept, he went to upper mgmt twice because he saw something was off in the accounts

"mysteriously" he got transfered then a few months later the **** hit the fan, he didnt get everything out in time unfortunately

I shorted 133 shares all the way to the bottom.

cha-ching $$$

I was there during the downfall and as I mentioned in an earlier post it was my first job out of A&M and I learned some lessons watching how people handled it going down.

I had options at something around $73 and then some more at $36. I will say that I did not own any actual stock.

I went to those company meetings you hear about and they had people really believing in the company. The Spring before it failed the unveiled their new mission statement - "To become the world's premier company" The story they told was very compelling and I could see how people bought into it.

One thing now I realize was not great was that during all the training classes about trading is they taught two ways - the normal way and the Enron way. The Enron way was different because they said no one else but Enron could get away with doing business like they did.

Something another poster said that is true is that I watched typically smart people buying more and more stock as it went down trying to hedge their losses because they couldn't believe it wouldn't come back. Those are the same people you saw carrying their stuff out on the day of the lay-offs because everyone else had long since cleared out their stuff but these people were holding out hope of it coming back.

One note on the girls of Enron playboy. I remember my HR lady was in it but all of us were mad because you only saw her backside. Very disappointing.

So, was Mr. Eberts the actor, or the actual guy who worked for Enron?


My Enron story is a happy one. My first job out of A&M was for a not for profit that was operating in one of the Enron buildings. I started after the collapse. Our offices were in one corner of an upper floor. The entire rest of the floor was accessable to us. It looked like a ghost town. There were books opened up to pages, flowers wilted, and it looked like the entire population just diappeared. Never one to miss an opportunity, I confiscated anything that I wanted. I got several file cabinets, office supplies, and I'm actually sitting in an office chair that was in an Enron building. Every time I would walk a load of stuff out to the car, the security guy would wave to me and hold the door!