There are far more interesting artifacts out there on the internet that just begged to be pieced together to see how Enron really worked. (One interesting source has been doing google searches which return html pages even after the pdf has been taken down.)
It would seem that traditional journalism just can't really put the whole story together. I find this more and more--that the genres of journalism really are inadequate for dealing with the ways the world is (so they are no better at information brokering in the Hayekian market place than the investment bankers). I guess this is something the internet, once you get a handle at finding information on it, makes all too apparent. The irony is had Enron, from the 1980s onward, just followed the Carlyle Group model instead of GE and Tyco, it would still be in business offering all those too-wonderful-to- be-true returns to its investors. Carlyle Group (though it is not now merely a holding company for defense in terms of how it makes its profits) really got started because the insiders knew that with the DoD under Cheney under Bush I, consolidations and acquisitions (and insider knowledge about them) were the dynamic driving profits in defense contracting. With Enron it was the global 'liberalization' of power. If you track their power plays on the internet, it's interesting how they converged in their pursuits in the realm of largely unregulated venture capital (but the fact that Enron was still a publicly traded company was their undoing). Now if someone could turn their analytic skills toward those other publicly traded companies' adventures in global venture/vulture capital, we might find out something truly revelatory about the US stock boom. The public side of the bubble still awaits deconstruction. The non-public side of it, such as Carlyle Group, Ripplewood and Lonestar may never be cracked. Charles Jannuzi
