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On this day: Enron files for bankruptcy

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398086 02: Meredith Stewart (L), who worked in Enron's networking/data processing department, sits on her personal belongings in front of the company's headquarters after being laid off December 3,2001 in Houston, Texas. Enron filed for Chapter 11 protection and sued rival Dynegy Inc. for $10 billion as it tries to recover from a tailspin that has crippled the one-time energy giant. The company said an undetermined number of its 21,000 workers, mostly among the 7,500 in Houston, would be laid off. (Photo by James Nielsen/Getty Images)

On This Day in 2001, Enron, once considered America’s most innovative company collapsed, writes Eliot Wilson

It’s hard to remember an economic boom now, but the last decade of the 20th century was exactly that for the United States. Annual growth was 3.5 per cent, the jobless total fell until there was nigh on full employment and in 1998 the federal government recorded a surplus for the first time in almost 30 years.

There was not only prosperity but the fizz and crackle of innovation. The creation of the World Wide Web in 1990 sparked a boom in technology firms like Netscape, Yahoo and Google, and existing companies diversified. Anyone, it seemed, could do anything, and the profits rolled in.

Enron had been formed in 1985 from the merger of Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. Its presiding genius was Houston’s Chairman and CEO, Dr Kenneth Lay, an economist from Missouri who had worked in the oil industry and the federal government before finding success in natural........

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