Enron

By 2000 Enron was the seventh-largest company in the United States, a Houston energy-trading giant that reported around $101 billion in revenue and was celebrated as the future of capitalism. Fortune magazine named it “America’s Most Innovative Company” six years in a row.

The innovation was fictional. Enron used off-the-books partnerships and mark-to-market accounting to hide enormous debts and book imaginary profits, inflating its stock while insiders sold. When the scheme unravelled in late 2001 the company collapsed almost overnight, wiping out around $74 billion and the retirement savings of thousands of employees. It filed for bankruptcy on 2 December 2001. The wreckage was wide enough to kill a second giant: Arthur Andersen, one of the world’s five great accounting firms and Enron’s auditor, was convicted of obstruction and dissolved, taking 85,000 jobs with it. The most admired company of its moment was a lie with a logo.