THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES

I can't get ENRON off my mind. I think it symbolizes this mess we are all in now. It's so Texas. The brazenness of it all, the gigantic sums involved, the imaginary profits carried on the books and the mesmerized accounting firms. Apparently every business guru believed in ENRON. I am happy to say that I suspected a scam from the first I ever heard about it - based not on economic brilliance, because I don't know a thing about their business, but based on that old fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes".

Well, actually I first heard the name when my sweet bright granddaughter got her first job as an accountant with Arthur Anderson (remember them?) and was sent to ENRON. I asked her what ENRON did, and she was uncharacteristically vague -"Lots of things" she said. She was right. But soon after I read a very long article, maybe two or three pages, in the New York Times about some genius at ENRON who was transforming the world. I read it very carefully, several times and I could not comprehend a word of it. This Enron genius had made up a concept that he was going to monopolize and market all over the world. I cannot describe the product, it was some kind of non-existent wave in the atmosphere that ENRON would own and market (and carry on their books as an asset.) I thought and thought about it - it was essentially air!! My son tells me now that it was something called atmospheric band width, which didn't actually exist at the time. The Times writer took this all very seriously, you would have thought it was the greatest innovation since the discovery of penicillin. I knew then that something was terribly wrong. Like the Emperor's new clothes, there was nothing there.

There is another thing I always thought was a phony, and I think events have proved me right. It is that economic master, Alan Greenspan. I know nothing about interest rates or the Federal Reserve system, God knows. But the weird pronouncements issuing from this little gnome-like man always struck me as a huge joke. Remember how people used to hang on every word of his totally obscure "reports" ? It was as if the Delphic Oracle were still around, when the ancient Greeks burned incense, and tried to decipher the prophecies the Oracle reluctantly spoke. Now we know that a lot of Greenspanese had no meaning - he has even obscurely said so himself. What a joke- just like the Emperor's new clothes again.