Revisiting Enron

What we can still learn (and unearth or recover) about a high-profile corporate fraud.

A. Works of Wonder: a YouTube channel of Golden Age era science fiction stories.

B. Marjorie Taylor Greene has left the second Trump administration (but she - or someone - came through for me in late 2025: “promises made, promises kept” indeed).

C. I re-watched Alex Gibney’s Enron documentary The Smartest Guys In The Room (2005) yesterday. The film includes a sequence about Enron traders arbitraging California’s electricity markets - and causing blackouts. You can hear some of the Enron trader audio - it’s Big Swinging Dick (Michael Lewis, Liars Poker) or Masters of the Universe (Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities) territory.

If you don’t know about Enron, see below. Plus, some of my Enron coverage in real time for the former website Disinformation (one source for Netflix’s hit franchise series Stranger Things) - my posts circa November 2002 are here (and can be found in the Internet Archive).

D. William T. Vollmann’s new four volume novel A Table for Fortune is out on 3rd March 2026 on Kindle and 10th June 2026 in hardcover.

E. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has attended Bondi terror attack victim Peter Meagher’s funeral.

F. Goldman Sachs Research on Venezuela and oil market impacts. Meanwhile, Polymarket odds on Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro offers potential early warning intelligence (CIA Handbook from 1972).

G. The most important news you will see today (not about Donald Trump).

H. We may face stagflation (high inflation + high unemployment simultaneously) over the next year (as part of a broader cycle of secular stagnation). Palantir’s Peter Thiel foresaw this 11 years ago in an interview.

I. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Macro and International Economics created by Professor Simon Johnson.