Stanford 2025 Global Capitalism Trust and Accountability Conference

Corporate crimes like fraud continue unabated in the United States. Jennifer Taub defines a chief reason as “accountability theater,” or the propensity of government prosecutors to pursue out-of-court civil settlements rather than criminal trials that, though they might lose them, would publicize the extent of corporate misconduct and better deter future abuse.

Elizabeth Pollman reviews barriers for holding corporations and their fiduciaries accountable under corporate and securities law.

Gerhard Schick discusses the CumEx and CumCum share-trading scandals that cost German taxpayers billions of euros over the course of several decades and the failures in political and social institutions that allowed these scandals to persist for so long.

Kleptocracy is often thought to plague developing countries, but this grand corruption would be infeasible without the West’s financial and legal plumbing to launder misbegotten gains. American and European government initiatives to remedy their complicity have run aground or even reversed course, particularly in the United States under the new Trump administration, writes Alexander Cooley.

Fabio De Pasquale, a prosecutor at the Milan prosecutor’s office who led the investigation into energy conglomerates Eni and Shell for their alleged involvement...

Corporations can sidestep prosecution by cooperating with the government and offering up employees to avoid their own criminal liability. Ellen S. Podgor discusses two prominent reasons why the current approach to corporate criminality is inefficient.

As private corporations gain unprecedented control over public data, Americans are losing access to the information that underpins democracy and critical aspects of their lives. D. Victoria Baranetsky argues that this rise of secrecy—driven by the rising value of data and government privatization—demands not just transparency, but a bold commitment to anti-secrecy as essential to democratic governance.

It is an economic truism that markets operate more efficiently and fairly when there is more transparency. However, in the case of sovereign debt markets, the virtues of transparency are partially offset by its costs, writes Mark Weidemaier. Without an international regulator or bankruptcy court, opacity sometimes advances the public interest, including by helping financially distressed governments protect assets.

Gary Kalman writes that actions under the second Trump administration to dismantle recent anti-corruption initiatives, including those pioneered during the first Trump administration, will cost dearly the American and global economy and enable many of the nefarious actors President Trump has publicly admonished.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York reflects on the history of cryptocurrency and his experience adjudicating criminal cases involving it.