Are We Finally Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Corporate Deceit?

This is pretty much standard operating procedure in corporate America -- Bank of America was just unlucky enough to have gotten caught. To boost stock prices and reputations, corporate executives go to great lengths to snooker their shareholders and put the best light on what they are doing. They hire fancy Wall Street lawyers, as Bank of America did with Wachtell Lipton, to find clever ways to accentuate the positive while hiding in footnotes any information that might stir controversy or put things in a bad light. In their version of corporate reality, lawsuits are always without merit, executives leave only for "personal reasons" and regulatory actions are settled not because anyone did anything wrong but simply to avoid the cost of litigation.

Over time, this cynical game has become so ingrained that investors, analysts and business reporters now simply take it for granted that they are being spun or misled