Our accounting professor, Stewart, is this old, grumpy Scottsman who likes to perform accounting "forensics". He looks like failed companies with tries to pick apart their balance sheets looking for causes. He has also served as expert witness in court, blah, blah. We spent a fair amount of time looking at collapsed companies. One of the companies we looked at was Barings Bank, UK.
The collapse of Barings was caused by this young British trader in Singapore who tried and failed to hide his losses on the futures market. The trader, after being found out, wanted to be tried in the U.K. instead of Singapore since it is a much harsher environment. After Stewart showed us a video of the trader in a German jail (he was captured in Germany), he told us that the conditions in Singaporean jails are harsher than that of U.K.
Nanang, a Indonesian, asked: "Just how bad is it in Singapore? Is it just men raping men?"
Last week, we looked at Enron's collapse. Tina, a really smart, witty, Danish classmate who worked for Mearsk, a large global freight company, shared her experience working with people from Enron. She had moved to Houston before the Enron collapse. At the time, Enron was her largest client. She described Enron employees she dealt with as smart, top notch people who are also nice to work with. However, they also knew they were the best in the industry. They knew, Tina said: "they were the biggest swinging dicks in the room."
The words we say.....................................
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