Enron The Smartest Guys In The Room Essay

Movie Reflection
Name
Institution
Movie reflection: “The smartest guys in the room” and “Inside job.”
Unlike normal documentary films, “Inside job” and “The smartest guys in the room” exposed daunting financial facts that caused an uproar among financial stakeholders in the United States. “The smartest guys in the room,” tells the story of how Enron rose to become the seventh largest corporation in America with what was essentially a Ponzi scheme while “inside job” brilliantly exposes the corruption in the US banking sector that led to the 2008 crash. Consequently, this paper offers a reflection on the two documentary films with regards to their similarities, differences, accuracy. Furthermore, the paper outlines important lessons leaned from the documentaries.
First and foremost, both films are very similar in their quest as they unveil facts behind certain financial crisis in the U.S. The first half-hour of the “Inside job” offers an absolutely clear explanation of the complexities of the crisis and the greed of banking institutions that led to the financial crisis. Furthermore, through its research nature, the film perfectly laid the blame at the feet of all who were responsible for the crisis. This includes bankers, rating agencies, and regulators who were intensively interviewed. Everybody inside or outside the banking industry that was interviewed denied that a financial crisis would occur. However, the crisis was so big that even Lehman filed for bankruptcy. As a result, the film attained a high degree of accuracy (Ferguson, 2010).
On the other hand, “The smartest guys in the room” film shows how Enron kept its stock prices high by creating false quarterly returns. The corporation created a market in energy, gambled in it and manipulated it. It moved on into other futures markets, even seriously considering "trading in climate." The film clearly shows how at some point, Enron gambling directors lost the entire company in bad trades and covered their losses by hiding the news and producing phony profit reports that drove the share price even higher. Hence, it seems that Enron was a corporation devoted to maintaining a high share price at any cost.
In terms of accuracy, the film describes a schematic diagram tracing the movement of debt to offshore entities owned by Enron. Two of the offshore companies were "M. Smart" and "M. Yass." The idea behind the offshore companies was to create phony offshore entities and move Enron losses to those companies. However, those offshore companies were off the books thus the few genuine accounting officers in the firm could not recognize those dubious transactions. Furthermore, in one of the in-house videos added to the film, Skill...