Enron #2

Please answer the following questions from the Enron article. Answers must be posted to your blog by April 18.

1. How does a Special-Purpose Entity (S.P.E.) work? Why does the "partnership" giving money to your company make a big difference?
2. How did Enron pit "twists into the S.P.E. game?" What does it mean that Enron "didn't always put blue-chip assets into the partnerships"? What was problematic about Enron using its own executives to manage the S.P.E? What was Enron's guarantee?
3. How did the world come to learn of Enron's use of S.P.E.'s? Is Gladwell correct in claiming that this is another example of a mystery? Explain.
4. What is the difference between "scrounged up" and "downloaded?"
5. Why does Gladwell claim that "It scarcely would have helped investors if Enron had made all three million pages public."? Explain what Gladwell means when he says, "But here the rules seem different." Who is Andrew Fastow?
6. Why has he "Disclosure Paradigm" become an anachronism?
7. Why did treating the German secret weapon as a mystery prove to be more useful? Specifically, how did the "propaganda analysts" (the batty geniuses) use reason to uncover the Nazi V-1 Rocket?
8. How has diagnosing Prostate Cancer transformed from a puzzle to a mystery?
9. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, how has "the situation facing the intelligence community has turned upside down?"
10. How does Admiral Bobby R. Inman believe the U.S. should strengthen the U.S. intelligence system? Why was his answer seen as unusual?
11. Gladwell writes: In a post-Cold War world of "openly available information," Inman said, "what you need are observers with language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they're observing." Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more slightly batty geniuses.

Does this curriculum sound familiar?