“Oh my God, you’ve got to go and see Enron,” said a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, “it’s chilling, brilliant, the perfect tragedy about modern capitalism — it’s got everything: irrational exuberance, sex, treachery and a devastating fall. Then go and have the truffles at Como Lario.”

Lucy Prebble’s play Enron is a compelling morality tale. It charts the extraordinary downfall of the seventh-biggest corporation in America, the winner six times of Fortune’s most innovative company, which went spectacularly bust in 2001 owing $65 billion because of the obsessive greed of the executives.

Prebble, the 28-year-old daughter of a CEO, understands the giddy excitement that turned Enron from an energy company into a “powerhouse of ideas”, the insanity of the treadmill, the desperate need to push up the share price, to take huge risks for excessive rewards, the dummy companies and the raptor vehicles feeding off the toxic debt. Everyone was complicit in keeping the bubble afloat from the investors, to the banks, the accountants, the lawyers and the politicians.

No one in the play, except the young daughter of the CEO, Jeff Skilling, questions where the money is coming from. The chairman, Ken Lay, is more interested in choosing the interiors for his corporate jet.

The moral is clear: this divorce from reality should never be allowed to happen again. Yet it did and seven years later the world’s banking system came within hours of collapse, according to the Chancellor. “All money is debt,” Skilling says in the play, a chilling harbinger of what happened over the next few years as financial institutions around the world bought up sub-prime securities without a thought for the dodgy mortgages on which they were based.

Surely this time the lessons have been learnt. No one wants to repeat the past 12 months of financial terror, the Masters of the Universe must be repentant. But astonishingly, they don’t seem to care. As the audience packed full of bankers spilt into the night from the Royal Court Theatre, they clearly didn’t get it.

The City appears determined to forget the last year. “It was a horrible blip,” said one Morgan Stanley wife who has just re-employed her gardener. The dog walkers are back in business in Hyde Park. I talked to one who is again in charge of eight Pekinese. “We don’t talk about my extended holiday,” he says.

The scaffolding is rising once more as houses are knocked together. “We are getting e-mails ending in gs.com again,” a Savills’ agent said. Goldman Sachs partners are itching to move to houses with swimming pools using this year’s bonus. Property prices in Kensington and Chelsea have gone up by 22 per cent since February.

Net-A-Porter sold out of £1,495 Roberto Cavalli thigh boots in hours last week. A Notting Hill football coach explained that he has just been hired exclusively by one family for £100,000 a year to teach their children to dribble. Parents are again worrying that they may not get their children into the ski club in Klosters this Christmas or be able to rent their favourite villa in Mustique for half term. Confidence has returned.

These bankers are not worried about their jobs or cash flow any more. Many have seen their basic pay double in one year just in case rules on bonuses are changed. The Centre for Economics and Business Research is predicting that in the next bonus season the total payout will be £3.3 billion in London alone. People who lost their jobs are being headhunted. Very few have made the life changes they promised, becoming teachers or spending more time with their families. In fact the survivors are sharper and more driven than ever, worried that regulators may get round to controlling them in the future, while revelling in the lack of competition (the crunch removed several big banks). Goldmans has shown that now is the time to make money, with record revenue for the last quarter of $13.8 billion and profits up 65 per cent.

At least after Enron, the leading players faced fraud and conspiracy charges, Skilling got 24 years in jail and there was an overhaul of US financial regulation. This time no one has taken the blame — apart from Bernie Madoff, no one else has been brought to account.

Those heads that rolled have had a comfortable landing. Public fury has been diverted from the City to MPs’ expenses. Hedge fund managers and bond traders have forgotten that for a few months they were pariahs.

Yet while Enron left 22,000 employees jobless, the bankers’ credit crunch left Britain facing unemployment heading for three million, a country floundering in debt, business bankruptcies and negative equity.

Both Gordon Brown and George Osborne rile at executives’ excesses but both are reluctant to act because they desperately need tax revenues with borrowing set to reach £225 billion this year. The only part of the country making money is the City. Goldman Sachs is expected to contribute £2 billion to the depleted public finances this year and its City workers a further £1.1 billion in income tax.

Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, has turned himself into a pariah in the Square Mile for calling banking a “socially useless activity”. They are furious at his attack, reasoning that they are now bankrolling the public services, kick-starting the housing market and employing cleaners, housekeepers and chauffeurs once more.

But we can’t possibly be grateful. The bankers now patting themselves on the back for dragging Britain out of this crisis were the ones who started it and have left the rest of the country still gasping.

Technically they didn’t break the law even if they have blighted the lives of pensioners, businessmen and graduates struggling to find jobs. We can’t stop them trying to make money but to borrow Enron’s company motto, if they start taking irresponsible risks again, surely this time we will have to “ask why”.

 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6848103.ece