Paul Merrill	
Web Assignment 3
Original Paper by: Andrew Meuth       http://www.geocities.com/andyjrbill42/ENRON.htm

			The Collapse of Enron

In Andrew Meuth’s paper of the Collapse of Enron, I learned how the seventh largest company in the world slowly worked its way into bankruptcy by manipulating their stocks and their overall earnings.  They basically screwed a whole bunch of people to make a quick buck.  By they I mean Jeff Skilling, Kenneth Lay, Andrew Fastow, and the auditors at Aurther Anderson.  
As the Enron stock reached $90 a share, things were going very well for the company that sold energy as well as stocks, but behind the scenes, corruption was prevalent.  Andrew Fastow the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) made it seem like the company was doing very well, even though they were going into debt. Fastow dumped the company debt into two separate companies that were owned by Enron called LMJ and LMJ2. 
Meanwhile Kenneth Lay the founder of Enron, promoted Skilling to CEO of the company, but then went back to work at CEO when Skilling resigned in August of 2001.  Soon after, when Lay kept failing to answer questions about Enron’s debt, the stock price plummeted to $0.36 dollars a share in December 2001.  It turns out that Enron’s auditor, Aurther Anderson was being paid to cover up the company’s losses.  Before the stock price plummeted, Lay, Skilling, and all other top executives sold their stock.  When the stock price plummeted, it affected people all over that had stock in the company.  People who worked for Enron lost their jobs and all their retirement funds from this collapse.