David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I can't let you get away with this, the run on the bank thing. The context you use it, it is totally fair. In the context that the Enron executives were using it, in this period, it was a completely unfair analogy. They were like, oh, it was really a run on the bank. If people hadn't gotten spooked from those darn journalists and the short sellers writing that story, we would have been fine. And no, runs on the bank are an issue when the bank is being irresponsible. You can't say, oh, it's just a run on the bank, because if the bank is runnable, there's a problem. Specifically, I think where all that money goes and the run on the bank nature of this is, remember, Enron is an active trader in the markets. None of their counterparties are willing to trade with them anymore without cash guarantees backing up the trade. They use up all the liquidity, basically, cash guaranteeing all the trade settlements that they're doing. At the end of the month, on November 28th, 2001, Dynegy walks away from the deal. The deal's canceled. The news of this hits the press at 10:30 AM, I assume, Central Time on November 28th. Amazingly, this is just like an amazing coincidence. Who knows? I'm sure nothing was told, or confidential information shared, or pre planned. At 10:20 AM, 10 minutes before the news comes out, Ken Lay's wife sells 500,000 shares of Enron stock that the Ken and—whatever name—that the Lay Family Foundation held. Unbelievable.…

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