<![CDATA[Jezebel: enron]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/jezebel.com.png <![CDATA[Jezebel: enron]]> http://jezebel.com/tag/enron http://jezebel.com/tag/enron <![CDATA[Why Must All Dudes "Always Be Closing"?]]> A few years ago I was writing a story on something called mark-to-market accounting. (No I promise! I'm going somewhere here!) The way mark-to-market worked with this one Enron division is roughly: they'd send salesfolks across the country promising big companies it would save them lots of money if they agreed to let Enron pay their energy bills for a set period of time. As an incentive to sign up, Enron wrote big checks to the companies for the privilege. Now, this division lost shitloads of money, but it didn't matter because when they needed to raise more cash from shareholders they would just prove they were profitable by using "mark-to-market" accounting, whereby they would book the year's portion of the profits they imagined they'd be making over the horizon of the contract. Of course, they had no fucking clue what these profits (or losses) would be. So they made them up! Pulled them out of asses and projections so rosy you couldn't even call them delusional. Anyway, I'm telling you this story not because mark-to-market accounting is currently being blamed for our present financial crisis — I mean, you know, as if — but because it gets back to this conversation I had at a bar the other night where a somewhat miscellaneous Lower East Side sleaze was trying to pick me up. A friend of mine was at right, fielding a flurry of amorous text messages.

The sender: a college friend of hers in Florida who had suddenly decided, after ten years of mostly long-distance friendship, that he wanted to marry her.

She was somewhat skeptical.

"What compels dudes," I asked the guy to my left, who had been hitting on me sort of pointlessly. "To constantly, like, pathologically, write checks they know they can't keep?"

I was thinking of my friend. I was thinking of Eliot Spitzer's bounced checks to the Emperor's Club. I was thinking of Jerome Kerviel and the internet bubble and Glengarry Glen Ross and the subprime mortgage crisis, specifically, this reformed mortgage broker whose self-published atonement memoir I had read about in Newsweek:

"The rate of property appreciation experienced on a national basis over the last seven years was not only a function of market demand, but was due, in part, to the subprime industry's acceptance of overvalued appraisals, coupled with a high percentage of credit-challenged borrowers who financed with no money down," Bitner writes.
Well, duh. The crisis, like every financial crisis that came before it, was in large part a function of an institutionalized neglect of the glaringly obvious and systemic groundless optimism.

"We intend to keep them," the guy said. "It's just that you always disbelieve them. We can see it in your eyes, you have no faith. Your lack of faith ruins everything."

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Really. If anyone I'd ever asked to marry me had believed I really wanted to marry them, then I wouldn't be single."

He proceeded to tell me the uplifting story of his live-in girlfriend's recent second-trimester abortion and order a scotch.

"That's on the house, right?" he asked the bartender.

"Uh, I guess," she said.

Confessions Of A Subprime Broker [Newsweek]
Hedge Funds Reel From Margin Calls [Bloomberg]
Glengarry, Glen Ross [Wikipedia]
Mark-To-Market Academic Paper We Did Not Read But You Could [Princeton]
Did Mark-To-Market Accounting Create The Credit Bubble? [Naked Capitalism]

]]> http://jezebel.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=367479&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Hot Nationalist Girls Gone Wild!]]>
  • The latest YouTube sensation: Serbs in white jeans go on a shoplifting spree in heroic protest of Kosovar independence! It is like the "Chocolate Rain" of crappy people. They don't even seem drunk. Just greedy! (Video after jump)
  • The cameraman told to "Get lost" by the girl so bogged down in stolen shit she can barely walk gets my I Want To Have His Babies Award for his response... [Reuters]
  • The McCain sex scandal is dumb and now the New York Times has to do more damage control than Mr. Inappropriation himself. [NYT]
  • But something happy came of it: "Stray Cock Express." [Alternet]


    • The Arizona co-chair of the McCain campaign gets charged with all manner of bribery and corruption and yet again McCain escapes unscathed because the whole thing makes the Bush Justice Department look way worse. [DailyKos]
    • Which is why McCain gets to spread all sorts of untruths about how Barack Obama wants to bomb Pakistan and cheat on his taxes without anyone but America's voters really paying attention. [Media Matters]
    • Remember when Moby and Natalie Portman used to do it? No? Then this is the post for you. [NY Mag]
    • Everyone was on us to write about that inane "wow girls use the internet too OMG!" story in yesterday's Times. God was that dumb. I feel less empowered being a girl who used the internet to read that fucking story. [Doree]
    • McCain hopes Fidel Castro "meets Marx soon." I think the only medium nuanced and sophisticated enough to adequately respond to this sentiment is South Park, but it does make the whole afterlife concept sound kinda fun, no? [Reuters]
    • Enron: where are they now? Well, Jeff Skilling is in jail for the next twentysomething years, Andy Fastow gets out in five, and some bankers who skimmed a few million from some phony partnership — "victims," really, of Skilling's "culture of greed" — are about to go to prison for three years apiece. I wonder if Ken Lay has met Marx? [Time]
    • The Hillary campaign is not looking so good. [Economist]
    • I guess I should really see No Country For Old Men before Sunday but Step Up 2 The Streets looks like it could be pretty good too. [NYT]
    ]]>     http://jezebel.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=359941&view=rss&microfeed=true     <![CDATA[Isaiah Washington Should Maybe Not Feel Quite So Sorry For Himself]]>

    • Shamed and fired former Grey's Anatomy cast member/homophobe Isaiah Washington tells the media he is getting by post-ousting by staying focused on his "day-to-day" life. And somewhere in prison Paris Hilton gets to call "First World Problems" for the very first time in her life. [People.com]
    • Former Enron Broadband CEO Ken Rice gets sentenced to 27 months. The funny thing is, Enron Broadband was barely even a real business but.. well, yeah. [CNN]
    • Topless lady gets $29K for settling with New York City over her wrongful arrest for exercising the right to her own Britneyness. "I've always just felt that was something natural," she said. "I've kind of always done it out of practicality." [CNN]
    • Following the deadliest insurgent attack of the Afghan war, a US air raid kills seven children. And yeah, Iraq still really really sucks. [NYT]
    • Sayeth Rosie O'Donnell: "I've been hanging around with those heteros for a full year and it's not fun. Turn around one and they'll stab you in the back with a high heel. They will." [People.com]
    • The age-old question of whether Democrats or Republicans are uglier is debated by the nation's best and brightest. [Wonkette]
    • Michael Jackson settles a $48 million lawsuit brought against him by some guy Michael claims to "not remember." [USA Today]
    • Seven U.S. casualties identified since Friday. [DoD]
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