I’ve been watching a lot of documentary films lately and recently saw Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The film was fantastic and gave a very detailed look at the company’s rise and fall.

One of the most interesting parts of the film is a segment where some of Enron’s traders manipulated the California energy market during the rolling blackouts that plagued the state a few years ago. Toward the end of the segment, audio from a phone conversation between traders, as they discussed wildfires that were burning throughout California, was juxtaposed against footage of the fires rolling through the landscape. Excited that the fires would make energy rates skyrocket, one of the traders gleefully exclaimed, “Burn baby burn!”

Sweet.

Funny, that kind of sounds like the commodities trader interviewed in The Corporation who said something remarkably similar when the Iraq-Kuwait war erupted. Or was it his comment about 9/11? I can’t remember which, but I recall that he was quite pleased with the world strife — the subsequent spike in gold prices made him a bundle…

TAGS: Enron | Greed | The Corporation | Ethics

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 11th, 2006 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Books and Films, Business Ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.