Consumers are too stupid to make good choices

[kandrathe]

So the term super greed seems confusing, judgmental, and pejorative to you, and you insist that fraud is what happened. Ok, I'll grant you that fraud is the 'what'. But do you really blanch at the 'why'? What else would you call it? Fastow and Skilling and Lay did it as an economic experiment?

Like most debacles, it started as a convenient way to cook the books so that they looked better to investors. Probably not massive at first, but just a swap of a little bit of loss under the carpet to make Enron look a little better than it would have otherwise. I've seen many, many corporate annual reports that gloss over little items like extraordinary gains due to the sale of some long held asset most likely to cover up the otherwise dismal performance that year. It's perfectly legal, and when simply looking at the corporate profits charts all you see is nice steady growth. You have to dig into the details to see the real picture, and the telling thing about Enron was they were unwilling to give anyone the details.

Greed is defined as having/wanting more than you need. So what is hyper-greed? I guess I equate labels like "greedy", along with other morality judgments akin to "lustful", "lazy" or "sloppy". People should have the freedom to determine for themselves how much is enough, as long as they don't lie, cheat and steal to accomplish it. Or, in other words, find your own truth as long as you don't hurt anyone else doing it. So, take Warren Buffet... By far the richest guy on the planet. He doesn't believe in inheritance, so now that he's got a foot in the grave, he's donating his shares of BH stock a few billion dollars at a time to the B&L Gates Foundation. I don't have a problem with Mr. Buffet acquiring $60 billion in assets. Look at how he lives, and what he doesn't do with that money. But, I admit, I don't understand him or his motivations.

I think somehow Skilling and Fastow believed they could eventually make the big lie they had concocted just go away if enough people invested in their stock. That once they got the losses under control, then it would just all be ok again, and no one would need to be the wiser as to how messed up it all was really. And, besides, they had one of the best accounting firms in the country helping them do this. But, that is when the market started to wobble, and people stopped being foolish and giddy with astronomical growth, they started to pay attention and ask the good questions they should have asked from the beginning.

Hey look a squirrel!

Where? Darn, I missed it!