From the author of the best-selling 'F.I.A.S.C.O.', a riveting chronicle of the terrifying rise of financial skulduggery and the damage it is doing.
The still-unfolding financial story is scary. One by one major companies - Enron, Worldcom, Anderson, Global Crossing are imploding, prey to greed, fraud and illegal finance and accounting.The global financial crossroads is at a perilous crossroads.
By 2002, the closing bell of the NY Stock Exchange was barely relevant, as securities traded 24 hours a day, around the world. The largest markets were private and weren't regulated at all. Companies' reported earnings were a fiction, and financial reports were chock full of disclosures that would shock the average investor if she ever even glanced at them, not that anyone - including financial journalists ever did. Simply put the appearance of control in the financial markets has become a fiction.
What Enron did was no different to what hundreds companies - aided by their auditors - do all the time, what they put on their balance sheet and what they hide off it, and how they exploit unfathomable derivatives.
