Je reprends un gros article sur Enron (sur Enron) de JAN2007 et je trouve ceci :

In late July of 2000, Jonathan Weil, a reporter at the Dallas bureau of the Wall Street Journal, got a call from someone he knew in the investment-management business.  His caller had a suggestion. "He said, ‘You really ought to check out Enron and Dynegy and see where their earnings come from,’ " Weil recalled. "So I did."[…]

"It took me a while to figure out everything I needed to," Weil said. "It probably took a good month or so. There was a lot of noise in the financial statements, and to zero in on this particular issue you needed to cut through a lot of that."

Weil spoke to Thomas Linsmeier, then an accounting professor at Michigan State, and they talked about how some finance companies in the nineteen-nineties had used mark-to-market accounting on subprime loans—that is, loans made to higher credit-risk consumers—and when the economy declined and consumers defaulted or paid off their loans more quickly than expected, the lenders suddenly realized that their estimates of how much money they were going to make were far too generous.

On est en juillet 2000, et on parle de choses que l’on sait depuis les années 90!