The day the Securities and Exchange Commission authorized this ‘speculation’ on the value of assets, Jeff Skilling brought champagne to the office: accounting as ‘professional scepticism’, as the classical definition had it—and it sounds so much like the poetics of realism—was over. Now, accounting was vision. ‘It wasn’t a job—it was a mission . . . We were doing God’s work.’27 This was Skilling, after the indictment. Borkman: who can no longer tell the difference between conjecture, desire, dream, hallucination, and fraud pure and simple.
The Bourgeois: Between...
