The FTX saga is hard to understand, but the greed behind it isn't

Back in 2001, precious few Americans could have explained what Houston-based Enron did as a company and how it got so spectacularly wealthy. But when it filed for a record-breaking bankruptcy, Americans got schooled fast about not putting their trust and money behind swaggering, fast-talking con artists. But fools and their money regrouped over the years, and along came FTX, a $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange that repeated many of Enron’s mistakes and yielded the same abysmal results. We suspect that a lot of investors who lost their shirts in the FTX failure would have trouble explaining e...