Friday, August 29, 2014

The Criminalization of American Business

Who runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company.

An important report by Economist is here.

2 comments:

  1. Pfft... Big business hires lobbyists to write the regulations so as to minimize competition by raising barriers to entry and hurt smaller companies who can't afford to hire an army of lawyers and "compliance" officers. Sorry if my compassion for big biz is lacking these days. Lay down with dogs and you wake up with fleas. What else is new?

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