What may be the more important factor in manufacturing future Enrons is the role of government in fostering the boom-bust cycle. Enron, then, is just one casualty of many--albeit the largest so far--of massive credit expansion and of manipulation of interest rates by the central bank.
Hey, accountants are people, too, and they're not very happy ones these days. Arthur Andersen’s accountants--not unjustifiably--think that they are unfairly being made the scapegoats for much of Enron’s unreported sins, and the consequences could be devastating for the accounting concern’s survival.
A quarter century ago, there was a gasoline crisis--caused more by gasoline price controls than OPEC--which convinced Congress that Americans were not competent to make their own automotive choices. Thus, CAFE standards were born. They were intended to force us to get better mileage by imposing harsh penalties on any automaker whose fleet did not meet rising fuel economy standards. The Senate rejected an increase but what about existing rules?
Sometimes government agencies make mistakes and foist a project on us that does more harm than good. In the South, one doesn’t have to go far to see evidence of one of the more pervasive and persistent errors of the Soil Conservation Service—kudzu.
Opponents of the market say we have to stop another Enron from happening again. Yet all the government's watchdog agencies completely missed Enron. The system of cronyism in Washington, D.C., made the debacle possible and made it harder for the public to find out what was going on. Existing laws will put Enron executives behind bars, but they won't touch any of Enron's accomplices in Washington.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and others who claim that the Enron scandal will be a watershed for regulation miss the point. Government regulation already dominates our economic landscape. Tossing on a few more rules might do damage, but it will not prevent fraud from occurring in the future.
Professional victimologists see bad investors as victims of biased research. But they ignore the fact that smart investors have plenty of chances to avoid bad advice. What the losers from the Enron collapse got taken in by was the Fed-induced Bubble, not someone else's bad research. Those who would impose additional bureaucratic restrictions on Wall Street only penalize everyone to protect the gullible.
Consumer protection regulation is the consumer’s worst nightmare. In fact, it is not protective at all. It is merely another one of those regulatory rackets that has the appearance of providing necessary security for a collective group in an entirely positive sense while encompassing no negatives. After all, how can anything entitled "protection" have a downside?
Far from an example of a market failure, Enron's saga shows that firms that invest too much in politics can easily become complacent in the face of changing market conditions. In economics, this is called government failure, and we can blame the growing requirement for firms to divert resources to grease palms in Washington as a necessary business investment for its occurrence.
While the facts (as we know them today) of the Enron debacle are easily available in most newspapers and on the Internet, they are accompanied by a number of myths that are being spawned by politicians and their media allies. William Anderson tackles a few of these economic and political "old wives' tales" and helps set the record straight.
