Amazing book. You must read it.
krollingh blurra solsezzo pizzellina crotalo passefrolla sonosazio ferdinand
inga20 porno anziane manga hardcore motore xxx sesso perverso gambling

This is not a criticism of the book, but an observation of its style. Eichenwald has chosen to avoid dry historical narrative in favor of the modern style of recreating dialogue, meetings and scenes based upon anecdotal recollections of subjects all conditioned upon anonymity. While that may diminish the overall impact of the book, it certainly enhances its entertainment value. CONSPIRACY OF FOOLS reads like a popular thriller, albeit one without murder or mayhem.

solsezzo pizzellina crotalo passefrolla sonosazio peroccolo ferluzzo pelluzza cerittomo proled splurrao porollo berkle cianki uelalre operolla pruzzo pruzzolo jeanmichel

I read COF on the beach in Greece, breathtaking. I had to slow down reading as I was not willing to finish it. Being part of the corporate world, it was like looking in the mirror. Brilliant book. Thanks Kurt!

Milko, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Thank you so much for such a detailed, well chronicled and novel-like book. It was hard to put down and I can’t believe I just spent the entire weekend reading the book. I was drawn to this book by a detailed book review back in March and promptly requested it from the library.

I really didn’t understand much of the Enron story and remember reading various bits and pieces over the years. The book was an insight into all the behind-the-scenes information that John Q Public never sees or hears about. Thank you for giving us those details.

I was especially interested in the California power crisis because we here in the Northwest are still paying for it.

Thank you, again, for such a powerful detailed look at how a large successful company was brought down by greed, arrogance and simple mistakes that rolled like a snowball.

Anne in Seattle

On page 178, KE describes how the finance division used creative accounting to plug a 1998 end-of-quarter earnings gap.

He writes that Chewco had agreed to pay Enron an annual management fee of about $2 million, but that fee could not be booked as earnings until Enron provided its yearly services to Chewco. The finance division suggested rewriting the Chewco contract, designating about 80 percent of this “management fee” as a “required payment.” If that were done, under Enron’s mark-to-market accounting, the entire fee due over the term of the contract could be booked as income immediately.

Quoting the text: “The amount Chewco owed Enron stayed the same. The terms of the transaction were identical. But since it was now required, Enron could count the present value of the whole amount it would be paid over five years as a corporate asset. Then, thanks to mark-to-market accounting, most of that could be booked as income.”

“Glisan had found almost $26 million in new profits, all by changing two words.”

HERE’S MY PROBLEM: $2 million x 5 years = $10 million max to be booked by Enron even if the company claimed “all” of the newfound asset as profit and not just “most,” as KE writes. How do we get from that $10 million to the $26 million that he says Glisan created by this maneuver? What am I missing here?

A POSSIBLE RESOLUTION: If the Chewco contract was for 15 rather than 5 years, the total fee over the life of the contract grows to $30 million. And KE’S $26 million would indeed be “most” of that amount.

So are we dealing with a typo error, or a math mismatch of some sort? Any ideas out there?

I’m about 2/3 complete and really enjoy the mode in which this story is presented. There are so many lessons resident within this collection of documents.

On a related note, I seem to recall that Enron was looking to buy an insurance / reinsurance company in Hartford CT to assist with real cash-flows. Does this come-out in the story or legal documents?

Yes, the book captivated me. But pitching it as a political thriller? Of cinematic porportions? That’s a stretch.

Dialog was pretty bland when the Enron execs went golfing with Clinton, etc. No in-depth expose of Enron’s input to Cheney’s national energy policy huddles. Nothing really revealing. More ho-hum than thrilling in terms of political dimensions.

My second nit is that so much of the book’s dialog has handsomely paid professionals beginning sentence after sentence with either “Well,” or “All right”…do people in Texas really talk like this, all the time?

My third concern is not with how the book is written. It’s with reading between the lines that hiring practices at Enron seemed to lack EEO consideration and other hiring parameters. The old-boy system seemed to enable any executive to promote someone within the company with only a casual conversation: no interview panel, no checks and balances re: who gets what opportunities to advance, no background checks. Or maybe KE just left that info out of the book because it is such a massive volume already.

Maybe I’m overly influenced by public sector, where there are constraints and formal processes when filling even executive positons. At Enron, a panel might have discerned whether candidates for CFO or Treasurer or whatever had the chops or not. With one-on-one hiring, there is less chance of perceiving flaws when the chemistry is strong between hiring official and his preferred candidate. But I don’t live in Texas. Maybe Enron’s HR impairments simply reflected standar practices within energy-related industries based in Texas.

This book was a must-read for me and I was pleased to be first at local branch library to request it. For further insight on Enron’s doings in India, read Power Politics by Arundhati Roy: a quick read and riveting.

One comment on page 148 of KE’s book:
Bonneville Power is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, not Seattle, Washington. It is a federal power marketer (selling bulk power from federal dams). There is a Seattle office, but it shrunk rapidly in the late 90s as Bonneville (BPA) restructured and downsized. (I used to work there). An Enron contract with BPA would most likely involve the Portland headquarters, not Seattle. Utilities (and ratepayers) in the Pacific Northwest are still paying for impacts of Enron’s actions in this region as well as the complications of the California energy crisis.

I am a prior fan of KE, re: The Informant. It is heartening to find in-depth writing in this age of high speed soundbites.