Enter Skilling’s Gas Bank. It was nothing less than the first serious effort to diminish the level of risk for everybody involved in natural-gas transactions. The basic idea was this. Producers (acting as depositors) would contract to sell their gas to Enron. Gas customers (the borrowers) would contract to buy their gas from Enron. Enron (the bank) would capture the profits between the price at which it had acquired the gas and the price at which it had promised to sell the gas, just as a bank earns the spread between what it pays depositors and what it charges borrowers. Everybody would be
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