--- product_id: 48166741 title: "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron" brand: "bethany mclean, peter elkind" price: "31.90 DT" currency: TND in_stock: false reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.tn/products/48166741-the-smartest-guys-in-the-room-the-amazing-rise-scandalous store_origin: TN region: Tunisia --- # The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron **Brand:** bethany mclean, peter elkind **Price:** 31.90 DT **Availability:** ❌ Out of Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by bethany mclean, peter elkind - **How much does it cost?** 31.90 DT with free shipping - **Is it available?** Currently out of stock - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.tn](https://www.desertcart.tn/products/48166741-the-smartest-guys-in-the-room-the-amazing-rise-scandalous) ## Best For - bethany mclean, peter elkind enthusiasts ## Why This Product - Trusted bethany mclean, peter elkind brand quality - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description What went wrong with American business at the end of the 20th century? Until the spring of 2001, Enron epitomized the triumph of the New Economy. Feared by rivals, worshipped by investors, Enron seemingly could do no wrong. Its profits rose every year; its stock price surged ever upward; its leaders were hailed as visionaries. Then a young Fortune writer, Bethany McLean, wrote an article posing a simple question - how, exactly, does Enron make its money? Within a year Enron was facing humiliation and bankruptcy, the largest in US history, which caused Americans to lose faith in a system that rewarded top insiders with millions of dollars, while small investors lost everything. It was revealed that Enron was a company whose business was an illusion, an illusion that Wall Street was willing to accept even though they knew what the real truth was. This book - fully updated for the paperback - tells the extraordinary story of Enron's fall. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Dimensions | 13 x 3 x 19.7 cm | | Edition | New Ed | | Isbn 10 | 0141011459 | | Isbn 13 | 978-0141011455 | | Item Weight | 336 g | | Language | English | | Print Length | 480 pages | | Publication Date | 30 Sept. 2004 | | Publisher | Penguin | ## Images ![The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61PfIz-m3GL.jpg) ## Available Options This product comes in different **Format** options. ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Barbarians in the Accounting Department *by on Reviewed in the United Kingdom 3 March 2007* This is a great book about a truly remarkable part of our economic history. I have a minor physical complaint I might as well get off my chest: In their desire to make sure readers get bang for buck (fear not: you do), the publishers have elected to set this book in miniscule type, meaning firstly that you may need reading glasses if not before then after reading it, and secondly that while this looks like a 400 page book, if it were ordinarily typeset it would have the heft of an MM Kaye novel.On the other hand, if over-length in a business book is the sort of thing that dissuades you, don't let it: this is one of the most riveting books on the history of finance you'll read, and it gets more and more addictive the further you go on.As a number of reviewers have noted, it is simply staggering that Enron can have ever got where it got to at all, let alone stayed there for the best part of a decade, with all the ostenisble checks and balances that sophisticated capital markets provide. Staggering. In checks and balances I don't mean regulators, who will always be the last ones to find out where market-based moral turpitude is concerned, but investors, stock analysts, brokers, lenders, rating agencies and fund managers: people who don't just earn huge remuneration, but stake their reputations on being sceptical in the face of unconvincing bluster.But as McLean and Elkind make clear in chapter after chapter, barely disguised and unconvinving bluster was, in large part, all Enron was. For all the "black box" accounting, it is simply inconceivable that Enron's true internal wiring could be kept anything like properly secret, since far too many people had to know about it. Internal and external to Enron there must have been junior lawyers, accountants, auditors, traders and marketers who all had to know what was going on, and people *do* talk: they gossip, they change jobs, they make inappropriate remarks. What's more, the existence (if not the detail) of many of the more toxic situations - the LJM Partnerships, the prepay contracts - were on the public record, so the burning question to my mind, which McLean and Elkind do not address, isn't so much how people could have been so greedy and deceitful (that's not hard to understand at all), but what sociological and psychological factors caused everyone else, collectively, to entirely suspend the critical faculties which they used to evaluate risks in the market. This is no idle query: accurately calibrating and understanding risk is the very key to making money on Wall Street: it's hardly an incidental oversight.Making a pejorative moral assessment of the acts of the Skillings and Lays with the benefit of hindsight is futile, self-serving, and actually unjust: our moral view of corporate behaviour *today* is conditioned and informed by the example of Enron; before Enron, our moral view was ipso facto different - if it hadn't been, Enron couldn't have happened.If we assume that, in the context of the markets, "moral consensus" is aimed at making sure people don't needlessly mislead, deceive or unfairly disadvantage each other, the far more interesting question is *how could the prevailing moral framework have failed so badly*? Why was it so inadequate at dealing with outcomes of actions we can now see (with the benefit of hindsight and our newly adjusted moral binoculars) are transparently odious?And that prompts a deeper question yet: what could it be about *our* prevailing economic mores which could allow a disaster on a similar scale to happen again?Had Elkind and MacLean ventured into that territory this would have been an outstanding book (it is still worth 5 stars in my view): as it was - and with an admirable absence of judgmental prurience - the writers stick to pure reportage, to the point where the epilogue ends rather abruptly without so much as a conclusion.But that's small beer: this is a fascinating, rewarding read.Olly Buxton ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A non-technical, tragic story, with modern implications... *by on Reviewed in the United Kingdom 24 March 2024* I read the book a lot quicker than I expected too. The book goes through the operations and accounting for Enron, and explains in simple terms what the company did to go so wrong as to go out of business, with widespread implications. But again, like many stories involving American market trading and accounting methods, it seems lessons haven't really been learnt from the event.The bulk of what is in the book is more than enough ammunition to level fair criticism at many aspects of the financial sector of the US, but there is a lot of interesting and passionate character studies within the book too. A slight criticism from me would be that many people are written as two-dimensional in many respects, which I suspect is embellished. From experience people don't tend to be so neatly fitting into 'types', although I'm willing to except Enron wasn't a normal place to work, for many reasons.There is a good and necessary criticism at regulators, internal and external, and credit-rating agencies and analysts for being too respectful and too paid up to criticise the company throughout it's decline, which is surely food for thought for anyone going forward. But given when happened on a much larger scale roughly half a decade later, it wasn't enough time for anyone to stop a much larger crash. It is interesting the book didn't discuss or deal with 'bail-out', from memory, so it appears no one was willing to prop the company up.Another intersting reflection on the personnel side of the company was how many people in positions of power at Enron seemed so 'normal', without much citation of talent necessary to work at a level where billions of pounds is at stake. A very good read. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Read this and weep for mankind *by on Reviewed in the United Kingdom 16 January 2014* The first thing to say about this book is that it is superb. Superbly researched and superbly written. The pace never falters and, whilst one knows the ending, the tension builds as the tsunami of misdeeds builds and builds before finally crashing down on the famous three, Lay, Skilling and Fastow. The numbers are extraordinary. Personal enrichment isn't in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions - it's in the tens of millions. Not just life changing amounts of money, but enough to change the lives of descendants of these three for many generations. The book ends before the story does . The congressional hearings and court cases aren't covered but nevertheless this is a must read for anyone wanting to understand why light touch regulation, so in vogue in the run up to the 2008 banking collapse, will never be adequate protection for the poor, the powerless and the unwitting. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.tn/products/48166741-the-smartest-guys-in-the-room-the-amazing-rise-scandalous](https://www.desertcart.tn/products/48166741-the-smartest-guys-in-the-room-the-amazing-rise-scandalous) --- *Product available on Desertcart Tunisia* *Store origin: TN* *Last updated: 2026-10-26*