David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Lehmann is the largest. It's the only one in the high hundreds of billions, whereas Enron had $63 billion in assets before filing. Enron is over, literally, given the colorful—is that the right word—evil. I think we mean to say evil cast of characters here. Everything goes just about as you could predict. The Justice Department begins a criminal investigation just about everybody except Skilling starts running left and right trying to cut a plea deal. It is worth before getting into the sentencing and trials, what is bankruptcy and what happens in their bankruptcy proceedings? I decided this was the time to learn the difference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 bankruptcy, because I've never actually thought about it before. It's pretty interesting. Both of them are options that you have when a business can no longer pay its creditors. Chapter 7 is when you just want to liquidate, cease operations, you turn it over to a trustee and say, we are done forever. Chapter 11 is this interesting temporary thing, where you are saying, we would like to reorganize. The debtor stays in control. By debtor, it's like a corporation. The company that owes the money to all the creditors stays in control. The court—a judge—and the debtor basically need to come up with a reorganization plan, agree on that, and then there's execution of the plan.…

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