The 1990s B.E. (Before Enron): A Few Bad Apples, or Rotten to the Core?

Blind faith in the glory of free markets, though, tended to sidestep the new and somewhat alarming realities of those markets. In fact, dramatic shifts in the fundamentals of Wall Street were taking place, shifts that would eventually send it spinning way out of control. Joseph Jett's arrival on Wall Street in the early 1990s was surely a triumph of opportunity over expectations. His father's family can be traced back to a slave named Fred Lattimore, born in Alabama sometime before the Civil War. Jett is only one of a near-epidemic of rogue traders who shook financial markets in the 1990s, contradicting the overall sense that until 9/11 and Enron, the post-Milken decade was relatively clean. Jett was running, in effect, a million-dollar lemonade stand, because Kidder Peabody's computers used different methods to value the same-day transactions and the future transactions.