Substituting Outrage for Thought: The Enron “Smoking Gun” Memos

Far from distorting the market, the majority of Enron’s strategies actually corrected potential distortions in complicated interrelated markets. To the extent that some of these strategies exploited market flaws to bring some of these markets out of alignment, there were obvious corrections available that policymakers should focus on rather than the futile, or at least unproductive, search for scapegoats.