I saw my second film of the Galway Film Fleadh this afternoon, it was entitled “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” The film opened my eyes to the culture of greed. I know that sounds cliché and naïve but that is alright with me. I did not know the extent of Enron’s corruption and the affect the company had on the stock market.
The part of this tragedy that grinds my gears is not so much the thousands of people that lost their retirement funds but the fact that so many financial institutions knew this was going to happen. The biggest investment banks put money into Enron knowing that the manner in which money was made was illegal and bound to fail. One of the ways Enron made money was through a hedge fund that was run by Enron’s CFO. He claimed to all of the investors of the fund that there would be no conflict of interest between his position as CFO and manager of the fund. The investors actually believed this was possible. They were thinking with their wallets, not their heads. The man in question received ten years in prison and had to return around thirty million dollars.
Enron is an example of sacrificing morals for dollars. This makes me wonder, what do I have to sacrifice to make my money?
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