12024 D AY Sstock analyst Ronald Barone (who to the confusion of many had the same name as the energy ratings ofial at Standard & Poor) calling the write-offs step in the right direction. Investors can look at this with more conence that problems are being faced and addressed,�he said. The story also quoted a subdued-sounding David Fleischer, who argued that Enron management needed to regain investor trust. hey need to convince investors these earnings are real, that the company is for real and that growth will be realized. That has to be proven over time,�said the Goldman Sachs analyst. He called for even more disclosure of ancial information by the company. Not bad, Emshwiller decided as he ished the New York Times piece. But they didn have anything about LJM, he thought with a small touch of glee, followed brie by a touch of regret. He was certainly happy to have beaten two major competitors with information about the partnerships. (Later that day, he would see that the Journal third major daily newspaper competitor, The Washington Post, had done only a paragraph, with no mention of LJM, as part of a long roundup of business news.) The regret came from wondering whether they had squandered their exclusive information on a daily story instead of saving it for a possible page-one piece. Rationally, he knew they had made the right decision, really the only one they could. Still, he thought, it would have been sweet to have gotten a front-page piece out of LJM. Hertzberg certainly felt that using the LJM material had been the right move. That morning, the Journal deputy managing editor sent Smith and Emshwiller an uncharacteristically long e-mail. ou made the absolutely correct decision to unload the details of the Fastow partnerships in the paper today; they added immeasurably to the impact of your story,�he wrote. want you to know that we still have a big appetite for more on Enron. We need to get to the bottom of all these huge, omplex hedging transactions�what they really were and why they failed. We need to get the real story of how Ken Lay created what was widely hailed as the world hottest energy company, and the huge, risky moves he took. Did Enron board really understand what he was doing How could they possibly have approved Fastow incredible conct of interest, and are there more insider deals like these Did Lay and his lieutenants really understand the risks of what they were doing,
