Their employees were persuaded to invest their salaries and bonuses only in Enron shares. Brilliant results reports were presented to investors. It doesn't matter that these reports are wrong. To make matters worse, top officials were siphoning off the profits. Of course, the public was kept abreast of new and interesting accounting practices, not to mention flaws in profit and loss reporting. Even the recurring blackouts that have hit California's power grid do not appear to have been artificially created in an effort to drive up Enron's stock price by causing a supply shortage (Peavler). By applying Jeffrey Silling's gas banking model to other commodities, Enron was able to create demand for virtually everything: its futures contracts included "coal, paper, steel, water and even the weather (Thomas). By the end of 1996, the revenue of the Enron Capital and Trade Resources division had grown from $2 billion to $7 billion. Two hundred employees became two thousand. It was the world's largest natural gas and electricity trader