Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…At various points in time, I think they have technically turned it on, but not actually. Yeah, it's still just sitting there. But Enron books billions of dollars of revenue and then they offload the assets. Everything we've talked about, it's just this metastasizing cancer on the world. The one thing that is credible about what they're claiming is the key thing to develop a society is widely available energy. There is this notion of like, okay, if the way to accelerate a country that is becoming—I don't know if developed country is the correct parlance anymore—an economy that has high employment, high quality of life, a good mix between information work and physical work, making real things in the real world, growing GDP rapidly, becoming a player on the world stage, whatever you want to call it, every single thing requires massive amounts of energy as a precondition. One major reason why the US got to be such an incredible superpower is that we burned tons of fossil fuels over the last 80 years in order to accomplish all the things that we have today and achieve the quality of life that most people in the US have today. There is a real, well-founded argument to be made that it is both good for these countries to come in and do this, and they'll need it anyway, so there's a huge market opportunity that we're pulling forward to now by creating a ton of energy capacity there. You can really see the insidious political tendrils of this company. Politically, this looks fantastic. Enron is financing the energy development of India, Brazil, Argentina, blah-blah-blah. The politicians love this. Here's this innovative American company. Whoo, man. As this gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger, remember the key on the back end to making this work for the special-purpose entities. Now, you only need to come up with 3% outside capital. But Enron starts doing so many deals that are so big, and they're offloading so many assets, it actually becomes a problem finding enough suckers to pony up even 3% of the capital needed to be offloading these assets.…

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