These include the now notorious off-balance sheet deals that shifted assets and debt from the company's books and into a byzantine collection of partnerships, many of them controlled by Enron's former chief financial officer, Andrew S. Fastow.
Changes in accounting regulations also mean that the funding status of DB plans brings volatility to the corporate balance sheet, Dealing with these issues is, at the very least, a distraction from the business of running the componay and thus hardly conducive to economic efficiency.
Think of it as a pseudo-off-balance-sheet deal.
These "sheets" deal primarily with mechanics.
The rest is literally history: The White House won that struggle with rationale, the invasion was launched, Poland sent 2,500 troops to support it, and in exchange the former Soviet state was able to buy $5.5 billion worth of Lockheed's F-16 fighters, in what Euromoney later revealed to be an "off-balance-sheet deal" arranged by JPMorgan and guaranteed by the US government.
The off-balance-sheet deals are raising warning flags about a possible slowdown here.
MF Global financed those positions through off-balance-sheet deals known as "repurchase to maturity" transactions.
And he was said to have specialized in off- balance-sheet deals, which are at the center of the Enron scandal.
Several weeks ago, the Fitch credit rating agency warned that such off-balance-sheet deals were understating the size of bank lending in China and thereby masking the risks associated with an increase in dodgy loans.
Analysts and investors, meanwhile, are scrambling to understand where the fault lines are; Enron, whose shares trade for 53 cents, demonstrated how risky off-balance-sheet deals can be for shareholders.
In other cases, dozens of banks and brokerage firms were approached about investing in Enron side partnerships and were shown confidential documents disclosing the extent of Enron's off-balance-sheet deals.
