John E. Olson, Merrill Lynch Analyst Who Was an Early Skeptic of Enron, Dies at 83

He just didn’t get it. That was the verdict of senior Enron executives on John E. Olson, a securities analyst at Merrill Lynch.

When Enron was flying high in the 1990s, Olson was one of the few analysts who was publicly skeptical about the outlook for the company, an operator of gas pipelines that had diversified into a complex array of businesses, including electricity sales, a power plant in India, and derivative contracts allowing traders to bet on weather patterns.