Faith & Spirit Quote by Kenneth Lay

Kenneth Lay’s line has the sleek, boardroom-friendly sound of humility, but it’s really a power move: the market is trustworthy, he implies, as long as someone like him gets to define the terms of trust. The phrase “faith in the market” borrows the language of religion to launder a controversial claim into something instinctive and noble. Faith isn’t argued for; it’s professed. And then the second half quietly pulls the lever: “when we get the rules right.” Who’s “we”? Lawmakers? Regulators? Executives? Voters? The ambiguity is the point. It casts rule-making as a technocratic tweak rather than a political fight over winners and losers.

In context, the line sits uncomfortably close to Enron’s legacy: a company that championed deregulation and market innovation while exploiting gaps in oversight, opaque accounting, and the very complexity it sold as progress. That’s why the sentence works rhetorically and why it curdles historically. It offers a neat escape hatch from responsibility: if outcomes are ugly, blame “the rules,” not the actors. It reframes market failure as administrative failure, a bug in governance rather than a feature of incentive structures.

There’s also a subtle inversion of accountability. “Rules right” sounds like consumer protection, but it often means rules that protect the market from scrutiny. Lay’s real intent reads less like confidence and more like conditional loyalty: markets are great, provided they are engineered to reward the people preaching their purity.