Enron #1

1.) Skilling was being brought up on charges of fraud. Beliveaux asked if Skilling was willing to live off of $1600 a month. This was used to show that Enron had no only damaged its shareholders, but employees as well.

2.) Petrocelli asked if the judge would reduce the sentence by a few months so that Skilling didn't have to go to a maximum security prison with violent offenders. The judge denied his request.

3.)A puzzle has information missing (i.e. a piece) but a mystery, all the information is present.

4.) A lack of information can be found, but since a mystery requires analysis, which is subjective.

5.) As is with most corporate scandals, someone always lies about something, so Enron was expected to be no different, but as it turns out all information was available, it was just a matter of asking Enron for the records.

6.)Mark to Market accounting lists future contract purchases as real tangible money.

7.) The money can either be listed as actually existing, or as what the company is projecting to make. Weil was asked to find out if Enron actually had money.

8.) Defaulted loans arose when high-risk customers were given sub-prime mortgages, thus showing how ineffective mark to market accounting can be.

9.)All the financial records proved that Enron had no physical money and that all the funds they had were projected 10 years into the future.

10.) Chanos job was to bet on the losses of companies and saw that Enron was showing signs of failing.

11.) McLean was a writer for Fortune Magazine who first investigated Enron's money problem.

12.) Watergate was a puzzle because Deep Throat was the missing piece of information that Woodward and Bernstein needed.

13.)No because he investigated and discovered the information himself, he wasn't missing a piece of information that he couldn't get himself.

14.) The officials didn't seem to mind the connection between a candidate for president from an oil family and the other being an environmentalist. Somehow that didn't raise any eyebrows to anyone.

15.) The officials at Enron completely cooperated with the investigation and all the information was given to Weil when he asked for it, so no information was technically missing, all that had to be done was it needed to be analyzed.