zenith

I have a small fascination with the failure of business.

Weather it be a failed gas station or Enron, I'm interested.

For example when I moved from Columbus to the lake there was a small Sinclair gas station on a nearby road. It was already closed then but the building and the pumps were still there. Today even those are gone.

This little station looked to be from the forties, it was little more than a shed. I always think that in the history of a failed business there was one day when it made more money than any other day. It reached a zenith and could not maintain it. This particular station probably failed when the interstate came along, one half mile north of the location.

If I wasn't determined to give up on collecting things I would be buying old stock certificates of failed companies. They often proudly show a powerful factory in full production, a factory that is closed or even gone today.

When I was a kid I went to the Timken plant that my dad worked at a number of times. The place was full of lathes turning bearings for the railroad. It is just a big patch of concrete on the ground today. All that machinery is gone and everything is torn down.

I always glance at the old Seagraves Fire Engine plant when I drive by it in Columbus. It is just about as it was sixty years ago. You can look at an old engraving on a stock certificate and look at the actual plant still today. Closed and empty it isn't as impressive.

Here is a short article at Robert Musil's blog about a new book on the Enron disaster. Seems the story is changing from what was originally being reported a few years ago.

I can't write about this without mentioning one of my favorite stories, When Genius Failed, The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management. The story of the catastrophic failure of a bond trading firm, a failure so large that it could have damaged the whole economy if not for the intervention of the New York Fed, every major U.S. bank and some foreign ones and the stock exchange.

Remember, the next time you go by a closed business, pause and think for a moment that at one time it reached a zenith of activity, a day when it looked like it could go on forever. Pause and think about what went wrong, think about what happened, think about how a lot of smart people failed to change.