æThe Smartest Guys in the RoomÆ by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind

Bethany McLeans’s and Peter Elkind’s The smartest guys in the Room’ is the must-read story of Enron’s rise and fall.
The brilliant account of major corporate wrongdoings in the US comes at a time when many Chinese companies have been shown to be flawed, including the recent case of Singapore-listed China Aviation Oil.
The two cases throw up some interesting issues.
Technically, the nature of CAO’s collapse is more similar to the collapse of Barings Bank in the early 1990s when Nick Leeson kept doubling up his bets on the direction of the Nikkei, eventually crashing out when the Kobe earthquake finally quashed his desperate hope of...