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I'm Krista Tippett. Today, a conversation about global business ethics and what my guest

Prabhu Guptara calls the gods of business. He reflects on such ideas for one of the world's

largest Swiss banks. A generation of people has grown up, particularly those who occupy high

positions in politics, economics, the media and all the rest of it, who have no transcendent values.

Or if they have transcendent values, they have no means of intellectually reconciling those transcendent

values with the way they do business. We'll explore how this disconnect has happened and why

for the sake of the global economy, Americans must reckon with the meaning of Enron.

This is speaking of faith. Stay with us.

I'm Krista Tippett. My guest this hour, global business analyst Prabhu Guptara,

has fascinating perspective on how an Enron scandal can happen and why it matters to people

around the world. He explains how the United States can be one of the world's most religious

countries, yet at the same time a culture in which moral values can fail to penetrate the workplace.

From American public media, this is speaking of faith. Public radio's conversation about religion,

meaning, ethics and ideas. Today, the gods of business.

In Houston today, federal prosecutors presented their opening statement in the case that the

judge calls one of the most interesting and important cases ever tried. It has been four years

since the Enron Corporation collapsed in an accounting scandal that still reverberates on Wall Street

including that their advisors, their accountants and their lawyers told them it was okay to do what

...