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谁掌管世界上最赚钱的生意操作?西西里黑手党吗?还是中国人民解放军?克里姆林宫的盗贼统治吗?如果你是一个大企业,这些不如美国的监管体系来得贪心。一个公式很简单:找一个大公司,可能(也可能不)有做错事情的时候,利用一些刑事诉讼案件来威胁其经理与企业理者,最好是刑事指控,强迫他们使用他们的股东的钱来支付一个巨大的罚款从而放弃指控并且签定一个秘密的结算协议(所以没有人可以查看详细信息)。然后重复同样的方法在另一个大公司实施。

这些数量是令人难以置信的。今年到目前为止,美国银行、摩根大通、花旗集团、高盛和其它银行被迫了接近500亿美元的抵押贷款支持债券，罪名是所谓误导投资者。法国巴黎银行(BNP Paribas)因违反美国制裁苏丹和伊朗被罚支付90亿美元。瑞士信贷(Credit Suisse)、瑞银(UBS)、巴克莱(Barclays)和其他人也支付了十亿美元,并且面临着各种指责。这只是一个金融机构。在英国石油公司的130亿美元的深水地平线漏油事件以来,包括丰田的12亿美元和解涉嫌在一些汽车过失,还有像这样更多的事件发生。

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.

The amounts are mind-boggling. So far this year, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and other banks have coughed up close to $50 billion for supposedly misleading investors in mortgage-backed bonds. BNP Paribas is paying $9 billion over breaches of American sanctions against Sudan and Iran. Credit Suisse, UBS, Barclays and others have settled for billions more, over various accusations. And that is just the financial institutions. Add BP’s $13 billion in settlements since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Toyota’s $1.2 billion settlement over alleged faults in some cars, and many more.

In many cases, the companies deserved some form of punishment: BNP Paribas disgustingly abetted genocide, American banks fleeced customers with toxic investments and BP despoiled the Gulf of Mexico. But justice should not be based on extortion behind closed doors. The increasing criminalisation of corporate behaviour in America is bad for the rule of law and for capitalism (see article).

Until just over a century ago, the idea that a company could be a criminal was alien to American law. The prevailing assumption was, as Edward Thurlow, an 18th-century Lord Chancellor of England, had put it, that corporations had neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned, and thus were incapable of being “guilty”. But a case against a railway in 1909, for disobeying price controls, established the principle that companies were responsible for their employees’ actions, and America now has several hundred thousand rules that carry some form of criminal penalty. Meanwhile, ever since the 1960s, civil “class-action suits” have taught managers the wisdom of seeking rapid, discreet settlements to avoid long, expensive and embarrassing trials.

The drawbacks of America’s civil tort system are well known. What is new is the way that regulators and prosecutors are in effect conducting closed-door trials. For all the talk of public-spiritedness, the agencies that pocket the fines have become profit centres: Rhode Island’s bureaucrats have been on a spending spree courtesy of a $500m payout by Google, while New York’s governor and attorney-general have squabbled over本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。