The Death of Corporate Reputation: How Integrity Has Been Destroyed on Wall Street

Introduction

My goal is to describe the role that reputation once played in fostering the high-trust environment that is critical to the successful operation of capital markets and corporate financing transactions generally and to try to explain what has caused so many firms in the financial industry to lose interest in cultivating and maintaining their reputations for integrity. Corporate finance and capital markets traditionally relied heavily on the ability of companies and other firms to develop what is known as reputational capital. For the industries on which I focus in this book, credit rating agencies, law firms, investment banks, stock exchanges, and accounting firms, reputational capital historically has been the primary mechanism by ...