Bethany McLean chimes in on the Madoff scandal and has a few more pearls of wisdom about Enron.
And as I had mentioned at the beginning of this, after the sentencing of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay in the Enron case, I wrote a piece for Fortune saying that the rules—the rules had changed now, and everybody in the business community understood that it wasn’t OK to operate in the grey zone. And what is our financial crisis but a massive case of everybody in the system operating in the grey zone? And so, it turns out that the Enron case really was the canary in the coal mine, and the sentencing in the Enron case did absolutely nothing to deter anybody else from following—from going down the same path.
If only we had listened to Bethany McLean. If only!
