zlacker

> Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.

I don't think it's disputable that what Enron was doing, by the end, was fraud. 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' got a little too caught up in attacking mark-to-market, which itself isn't intrinsically fraudulent, but boy can it be misused for fraud, and the Enron guys absolutely and inarguably used M2M (among many other things) for fraud. Wilfully and knowingly.

Life is indeed shades of grey, but don't get so unmoored in your relativism that you end up giving cover to people doing genuinely bad things.

>>troad+(OP)
My read of the book was that at the beginning Enron was attempting to use M2M for their "Gas Bank" concept, and at that point it wasn't obvious that it was wrong, and it wasn't fraud either. We now don't accept M2M accounting for what they were using it for, but they were seemingly the first (or first to get noticed?) to use it in the way they did and if things worked out differently maybe it would have stuck. In this way I think it's a bit of a case of "history is written by the victor".

By the end they were doing clear and obvious fraud, particularly in how they orchestrated the incoming funding for projects, and it had become clear that M2M was not working, but I don't think this was the only possible outcome.