To lose one billion dollars is unfortunate, but to lose two billion is careless - and embarrassing.
One of the most prominent casualties of the Enron collapse is the New York family of Robert Belfer, a prominent philanthropist and society figure. A year ago, the family's stake in the Houston energy trader was worth $2 billion (€2.26 billion). Today it is valued at a pittance.
Mr Belfer apparently feels depressed and stupid, "as if the whole world was looking at him", a friend reportedly said.
The fact that Mr Belfer and other shareholders did not see the collapse coming has, however, underlined a growing problem in corporate America for investors. This is the manipulation of financial results and the failure of accountants and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to bring the situation under control.
Enron is only the latest in a growing list of publicly-traded companies found to have engaged in dodgy accounting, including Waste Management and Lucent Technologies. Investors are wondering how many more are out there.
The spotlight is being turned on Wall Street analysts, money managers and accounting firms for not probing deeply enough into practices designed to shore up share prices. The Wall Street Journal, whose investigative reporting helped expose the hollowness of Enron's finances, blamed a culture of "highly questionable financial engineering, mis-stated earnings and persistent efforts to keep investors in the dark".
Enron, which filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, faces law cases taken by at least two dozen shareholders who, like the Belfer family, lost fortunes when Enron stock fell from a high of almost $85 a share last year to less than one dollar this week.
They include employees who saw their pension funds - heavily padded with Enron stock - become almost worthless.
The company is also the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation, a SEC probe and a Congressional inquiry.
Enron's global finances were so complicated - it has 3,500 subsidiaries and affiliates - that analysts could not fully understand what was going on, but with such attractive earnings and stock gains they encouraged investors to jump in.
Enron's accountants, Andersen (formerly Arthur Andersen), who had a whole floor at the trader's Texas headquarters, received $52 million in total fees last year and $27 million in unrelated fees, creating a strong disincentive to challenge executives bending the rules.
It now turns out that the rules were stretched to breaking point at Enron, which was expanded by its chairman Mr Kenneth Lay - the biggest donor to President Bush - from a gas pipeline company a decade ago to the world's leading energy trader.
The company was dependent on commissions for trades in all sorts of commodity, and on financial services rather than hard assets.
It created undisclosed partnerships run by its own officials as part of a scheme which inflated earnings by millions of dollars. But its financial tangle began to unravel on August 14th, when Enron filed a report with the SEC for the second quarter.
It disclosed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars between Enron and the partnerships known as LJM Cayman LP and LJM2 Co-Investment LP, run by chief financial officer Mr Andrew Fastow, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.
Enron said the dealings, some of which involved buying Enron assets, were above board and designed to help Enron protect its assets against fluctuating market prices.
However, they were much criticised inside Enron itself for the estimated $30 million which accrued to Mr Fastow personally.
In reporting third-quarter earnings on October 16th, Enron disclosed a LJM-related charge of $35 million, but admitted later that the true charge was $462 million when declining values of LJM-held Enron assets were taken into account.
Enron stock started to tumble when this was published by the Journal on October 17th, and news of a $1.2 billion reduction in shareholders' equity then reached investors.
On November 8th, the firm for the first time disclosed to the SEC its dealings with an entity called Chewco Investments LP, set up in 1997 when Enron was missing its quarterly earnings targets. Between 1997 and the end of 2000, Enron's dealings with Chewco and a related partnership kept hundreds of millions of dollars of debt off Enron's books, boosting Enron earnings for the period by $586 million.
The case against Enron now centres on whether Chewco was a shell company created simply to boost profits.
The case against Enron's top executives is that during the years in which they issued earnings reports they knew to be incorrect, they also enriched themselves by selling blocks of inflated Enron stock.
Enron shareholders are meanwhile filing lawsuits against Andersen for its auditing of Enron's books.
And in an attempt to salvage their reputation, the big five accounting firms - Andersen, KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young - promised yesterday to come up with recommendations by the end of the year on improving corporate financial disclosure.
