NEW YORK — From humble origins as a natural-gas distributor, Enron became a trading operation with the Midas touch. It made bets on oil, water, Internet traffic, even the weather. Wall Street’s brightest worked there. Its stock tripled in two years.
Virtually no one knew how it had made so much money. Ten years ago today came the answer: It hadn’t.
Enron’s bankruptcy Dec. 2, 2001, revealed a fraudulent illusion. Investors swore they would not be so profoundly deceived again. But it was only the beginning of a decade when so much in the economy was not as it seemed.
One reason people didn’t know how Enron made money was that it was an amalgam of 3,000 private deals that came to light in its collapse, partnerships with such names as Raptor, Condor and Chewbacca.
Behind those obscure names, Enron shunted billions of dollars of debt off its books. The collapse wiped out $11 billion in stock value, nearly 10 percent in the 401(k) retirement accounts of Enron employees.
By 2006, Enron’s former president, Jeff Skilling, left, began serving 24 years in prison. Chairman Ken Lay died in Aspen before he could be sentenced. The Associated Press
