The Spreading Scourge of Corporate Corruption
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Libor scandal is how familiar it seems. Sure, for some of the world’s leading banks to try to manipulate one of the most important interest rates in contemporary finance is clearly egregious. But is that worse than packaging billions of dollars worth of dubious mortgages into a bond and having it stamped with a Triple-A rating to sell to some dupe down the road while betting against it? Or how about forging documents on an industrial scale to foreclose fraudulently on countless homeowners?
The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans. Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years.
We should be alarmed that corporate wrongdoing has come to be seen as such a routine occurrence. Capitalism cannot function without trust. As the Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow observed, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.”
Rest from the NY Times here…
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Now apply this article to the Federal Reserve (which is not a Federal department, but a private corporation), or how about the ABA, or any state Bar Association, all of which are private corporate professional associations.
This author refers to the LIBOR scandal as being “egregious”. Which is another way of saying “offensive” instead of a massive criminal conspiracy.
He doesn’t seem to address the fact of what will happen if we allow thieves a “get out of jail free card”, the public is already furious for the crimes that TBTF have committed, trust has long been obliterated and this is no typical business cycle as much as Banksters would prefer us to believe. This author might not be living in the USA, since he refers to “institutions that underpin the nation’s liberal market democracy. ” The USA is mostly “controlled by criminal enterprises who have captured authority in a result commonly referred to as fascism”. There, fixed it.