“An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron”, 2020-04-27 (; backlinks; similar):
[”Admirably lucid revisiting of Enron’s metamorphosis from a pipeline company into a derivatives trading-house that booked billions in paper profits before collapsing.” The Enron story displays the potentially distortionary impact of high intelligence on moral decision-making. It lends evidence to the notion that extremely intelligent people can be subtly incentivized to be (systematically) dishonest because their intelligence lowers the cost and raises the potential benefits of circumventing rules.” —The Browser summary
What, in a nutshell, was the Enron fraud? Like a tech startup, Enron had a vision of creating many new markets by upfront investments; to achieve this, which was in fact often a viable business strategy and had worked before, it needed debt-financing and to look like a logistics company with stable lucrative locked-in long-term profits, though its profits increasingly actually came from volatile unreliable financial trading. From this pressure and the need to keep up appearances to avoid switching horses in mid-stream before projects could pay off, a house of cards built up, deviance was normalized, and it slowly slid into an enormous financial fraud with few people realizing until the end.]