Enron was around $400 million.
Worldcom: 3.4 billion
Xerox: 2 billion

Peanuts. Chaff. Confetti. Parsley.

Drug giant Merck & Co. recorded $12.4 billion in revenue from the company’s pharmacy-benefits unit over only the past three years that the subsidiary never actually collected.

booming economy.
big mystery.
nobody can figure out how it is sustaining itself.
now we know.

"Lies, damn lies, and annual reports."

Anyone good enough on their history to know how the Great Depression started?

Anyone good enough on their history to know how the Great Depression started?

The CEOs of America are certainly giving it the old college try. Reallistically, no investor can trust the data from any major accounting firm. They all lobbied and bribed like mad to be allowed to embrace the conflicts of interest that led us here. Nor can the market analysts be trusted, not as a group anyway. Most of Congress was involved in altering the rules to make this possible and our Prez' history is not encouraging.

On the plus side, some of the pols do seem to have an inkling of what's at stake -- the nation's fortune, yeah, but more importantly to them, their fortunes and careers.

One of the companies, I believe it's Worldcom, is also blaming Andersen Accounting for the whole mess. I wonder if the other two companies used them as well, and that's how they discovered it.

"Hey, lookit that, Enron's books were all messed up by Andersen."
"Huh. Who do we use for our Accounting?"
"... Oh crap."

I'm not in any way removing the blame from the companies themselves, but it would be interesting to learn that there's a connection of that sort.

Andersen Accounting > Andersen Auditing. Though for these purposes, it's becoming a good whipping boy.

The Great Depression is an illustrative example. So is a quick lookup of "The Gilded Age," which bears way too many resemblances to the 1990s for comfort.

I may be glad I've got another few decades of work life ahead of me ...

Canned goods, canned goods and ammo. I'm ready.