The SEC and the Department of Justice Ruined Arthur Anderson's CPA License.

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The Houston office of Arthur Anderson, they go on for weeks like the volume of evidence destroyed here. They're shredding one ton of paper every single day. The SEC in 2002, middle of 2002, revokes Anderson's CPA license. I think their customers all just left. And so Arthur Anderson basically ran out of business.

The FTX fraud has dominated headlines now for weeks, during which we’ve debated if and how Acquired could uniquely add to the conversation. Then we realized there was an angle so perfect that we had to drop everything and enter Acquired research overdrive: Enron. Travel back with us to the granddaddy fraud of them all, 2001’s then-largest bankruptcy in US history and the impetus for the famous Sarbanes-Oxley Act. So much of Enron’s history parallels FTX that the uncanniness is almost unbelievable — right down to the same CEO running the two bankruptcies. Sit back and enjoy this crazy tale of villainy, greed, and the nature of humans and money. Maybe just don’t take notes on this one…

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