Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I've thought about this a little bit. We talked about it, the earlier part of the episode, where they have, first, Lay in his original companies, and then Skilling and Lay together with creating the energy derivatives market. I think there's value to doing that. Had the company stopped there and just been a trading participant in the energy derivatives market, yes, there would have been value there. I think they probably would have ended up like one of the Wall Street banks. Look, some banks are stronger than others; the league tables change. It's a commodity. Nobody dominates the industry. There's no monopoly bank, but there's an oligopoly, and they all do pretty well. I think Enron probably would have ended up like that in the trading business. I don't know that there's any real specific power in the way that Hamilton talks about it, where you can literally earn better returns than your competitors, but I think they would have been part of that oligopical mix, so to speak. The argument that they could have actually done better is I think that Enron Online was a real way that they could have gotten real market power. I'm trying to think about what that is. It's probably a cornered resource. They would have had better access to information about the market than anyone else. It's almost like the Citadel's business. Yes, Citadel's or FTX and Alameda before it all went wrong. But Citadel is a good example.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.