Quote from: The Electric Monk on September 29, 2011, 10:08:09 AM

Quote from: repentance on September 29, 2011, 10:04:16 AM

If people put the same amount of effort into finding out who they're dealing with before doing business with these ventures as they do into trying to locate that information after the horse has bolted, half of these dramas wouldn't happen in the first place.

I wonder if people said that after Enron.

They certainly did. There were even analysts who questioned whether Enron was all smoke and mirrors before it collapsed. Even some accountants at the firms signing off on Enron's financials raised questions about what was really going on. The very people - the analysts and the accounting firms - who were supposed to be putting Enron under scrutiny, were feeding at its trough and looking the other way.

By pure chance, The Smartest Guys in the Room was on TV here the other night. It remains a compelling story, but the fact that the whole sub-prime mortgage collapse thing was able to happen in a post-Enron world convinces me that people really are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.