The criminalisation of American business
Companies must be punished when they do wrong, but the legal system has become an extortion racket
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.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The criminalisation of American business"
From the August 30th 2014 edition
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