Wow. If these things Moore says are true, in more than just the factual sense, perhaps the CBS poll question was a bit less irresponsible than I thought.
I met yesterday with a guy who sells information systems consulting to energy companies. (He's looking at launching his own new venture wanted my advice about strategy, business plan, investors, etc. -- that's a lot of what I'm doing now.) He told me that Enron was so internally disorganized that there are many documented cases where there traders were selling the same blocks of energy without realizing it. Power company A would sell a block to B, which would divide it up, sell it to two others, each of which might divide it further, etc. And all along the way, the trades were handled by Enron traders. In short, terribly inefficient simply because they were using computer systems that weren't integrated enough to let them know that they could have made far more efficient trades. It would seem that Enron drove up energy prices in part simply by creating an extremely inefficient market. But the real scandal, I think, is that our system of disclosure and oversight totally failed. There will always be companies that try to cook the books; something is wrong with a system that allowed it on such an extreme scale, intuition screams at me. Nick
