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Gilbert: Massive corporate frauds can only reach extreme heights during bull markets

Ben Gilbert · Enron · Acquired · Nov 29, 2022 · at 7:48

Ben Gilbert (co-host of Acquired) discusses how market mania and excess capital facilitated corporate frauds like Enron and FTX.

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“The thing that occurs to me is this is something that can only occur to this height in a bull market, where there's so much capital saturating so many opportunities that people are willing to go way out on the risk curve looking for returns. Where there's so much FOMO playing into it that they sort of have to pile into these low disclosure, super risky type of assets, because everything else is already at all-time highs and crazy multiples, and of course it's the people's fault driving the car that gets us here, but the environment around the car on the road is definitely facilitating it.”

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