{"id":52390,"date":"2020-04-11T07:44:51","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T12:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=52390"},"modified":"2020-04-11T07:44:57","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T12:44:57","slug":"is-the-u-s-fracking-boom-based-on-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=52390","title":{"rendered":"Is the U.S. Fracking Boom Based on Fraud?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is the U.S. Fracking Boom Based on Fraud?<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"typewriter<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a 2016 interview with Fraud Magazine<\/a>, former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow explained what he thought made him so successful while at the former energy corporation that’s now infamous for financial scandal.

\u201cI think my ability to do structured financing, to finance things off-balance sheet and to find ways to manipulate financial statements \u2014 there’s no nice way to say it. Like I said at the conference, I was good at finding loopholes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Fastow explained, in finance, the difference between a loophole and fraud isn\u2019t always easy to identify. And that may be something the U.S. fracking industry is working to its advantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fastow, the convicted fraudster, does admit that what they did at Enron misled investors. \u201cWe created something that was monstrously misleading, but any one of those deals alone wasn’t necessarily considered fraudulent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast-forward to today and a different part of the energy industry: The U.S. shale oil and gas industry has lost more than a quarter trillion dollars since 2007, while being sold to investors as an economic boom, even at oil prices much lower than those of recent years. Does that financial mismatch seem misleading? Or perhaps, familiar?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an unexpected twist, Fastow now gives talks to the energy industry on ethical leadership.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sounding the\u00a0Alarm<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bethany McLean was the first reporter to question whether Enron was a financially sound company in a 2001\u00a0article for Fortune magazine.<\/a>\u00a0McLean went on to co-author the book\u00a0The Smartest Guys in the Room<\/em>, which documented the fall of Enron due to its fraudulent practices, including\u00a0the ones Fastow\u00a0engineered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is the U.S. Fracking Boom Based on Fraud? In a 2016 interview with Fraud Magazine, former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow explained what he thought made him so successful while at the former energy corporation that’s now infamous for financial scandal. \u201cI think my ability to do structured financing, to finance things off-balance sheet and to find ways to manipulate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5317,5707,1466,11782,827,12732,846],"class_list":["post-52390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-desmog-blog","tag-financial-manipulation","tag-fracking-industry","tag-justin-mikulka","tag-united-states","tag-us-fracking","tag-us-shale-oil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52391,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52390\/revisions\/52391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}