Samuel W. Buell, Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America's Corporate Age.

Extract

We live in an age of extraordinary corporate power and frequent corporate scandals: malfeasance at American defense contractors, savings and loans, and health-care companies in the 1980s and 1990s; grossly manipulated financial statements at major companies in the 1990s and early 2000s; blatant schemes of tax evasion in the same decades, conjured up by leading law and accounting firms; major safety lapses at Toyota, General Motors, and British Petroleum; rampant bribery of foreign officials by Siemens; and widespread deceptions/manipulations associated with the securitized mortgage markets, emissions standards by automakers such as Volkswagen, the setting of interbank interest rates, and the creation of unauthorized accounts at Wells Fargo.