In this era of the Great Recession, our elite comforts itself by thinking it could not have been predicted and therefore just happened. Lessons to stop a repeat are to be learnt and we all move on, unless you’re Lehman Brothers and you cease to exist.
Lehman Brothers make a cameo appearance in the part drama, part dance, part musical production Enron and their dysfunction, even ten years ago, is aptly parodied. But were the lessons of Enron’s collapse in 2002 learnt? They rationalised away their debt not into exotic portfolios but dummy companies that were like Russian dolls in the good times, but a house of cards – with its pyramid style – in the bad. Of course, what Enron did was illegal. What the banks did in the run-up to 2008 was, for the most part, entirely legal.
Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were economic gangsters of the highest order – the latter squaring up to any critics at the end sounding like if Al Capone were to attempt to defend his record. If Lay was highly immoral though, Skilling was thoroughly amoral – the kind of man who wouldn’t just trade his grandmother but hive off all parts of her body and sell them on as derivative packages, all in the name of innovation of course. He took social Darwinism to its Hobbesian extremes; now, social Darwinians don’t have a good rep and Skilling did nothing to enhance that. His ideology is such that he doesn’t feel a need to apologise to the 20,000 ex-Enron employees who invested their pensions, health insurance and life savings in Enron’s shares, as they were encouraged to do (it’s the American way), only to be wiped out when the company went under – these people have failed to survive as the fittest and deserve everything they get. All the time, he fails to realise that he is the biggest failure of all.
The play at the Noël Coward theatre is a modern take on the Emperor’s New Clothes, except that the Emperor knows he is naked and when he is deposed, it’s the ordinary person who gets squashed. Skilling got 24 years 4 months (when Bernie Madoff ripped off rich investors he got 150 years, go figure), but don’t feel sorry for him, since he’s still got $100 million in the bank waiting for him when he comes out.
The brilliance of enron is snot simply in the way it angrily lays bare the power lust, greed, corruption and arrogance as masters of the universe watch their own collapse, but the allusions we can infer from the characters and their backgrounds. For instance, Lay is the son of a Baptist preacher and such religious figures believe those who commit suicide go to hell, but at his funeral near the conclusion it is alleged that he topped himself to avoid prison, thus questioning the solidity of his faith and how far self-interest governs his life.
Even as the company is spinning out of control, they get their teeth into the deregulated Californian electricity market and Lay and Skilling seem to have had shame bypass operations as they purportedly rigged the Golden State’s energy market to bring down the Democratic governor and install a Republican in the form of Arnold the Gubernator (very amusingly caricatured by two people – as one – here) in the aforementioned position. Skilling at one point says that it is his job to get around regulation, put in place by bottom-of-the-class, know-nothing politicians. But in the free-for-all that was electricity provision in California, people died as the rich, for their own personal use, outbid the public services such as traffic lights and hospital for electricity use. Electricity was traded as infrastructure decayed, neglected, eventually leading to the two day rolling blackout across the whole state.
Topically, the last big idea Enron had was to trade the weather, that is, to buy up commodities whose supply has been affected by unfavourable climatic conditions. The very previous evening on Newsnight, there was a report on a hedge fund manager, popularly known as Chocfinger, who has corned the cocoa market after bad weather led to a bad harvest in a major cocoa producer. This hedge fund manager makes a £1 billion profit while westerners have to pay more for their chocolate bars and coffee (because by squeezing supply, demand increases and you can therefore charge more for your product) and farmers in the developing world starve or are impoverished as they can’t afford to buy the seeds to sow the next batch of crops. Enron want a piece of this and the heirs to Enron are doing very nicely.
The acting is top-notch building the traits of the characters slowly so you can see how they came to the decisions that they did. Their actions are interspliced with movie references such as Jurassic Park and Star Wars that make complex transactions far more accessible to a general audience.
At the conclusion, the play poses the teaser – doesn’t, not only human history, but our own lives, reflect a stock market chart; that we immerse ourselves in a feel-good bubble before it eventually pops and we crash. Given that it is Skilling delivering the oratory, the nihilism is understandable and you don’t have to agree with it, but there is an element of truth swirling around in there. Just need to keep believing, to keep hoping. Five out of five.