Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Responding To Deception: The Case Of Fraud In Financial Markets, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington

Brooke Harrington

The economic history of the 21st century reads like a litany of Biblical plagues: instead of locusts,frogs and boils, we have Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, followed by the options-backdating scandal, and now the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. It is perhaps even more disheartening to realize that American investors are still in much the same position as Emerson was over 150 years ago: dismayed to find themselves on the receiving end of deceptive corporate practices. BusinessWeek summed up this crisis in financial markets with the headline: “Can You Trust Anybody Anymore?”