Corporate Violence: Solutions to corporate violence

Corporate Violence: A Subset of White-Collar Crime

Corporate violence is a subset of white-collar crime in which businesses and organizations intentionally harm or kill living things. Violence may be caused by unfavorable laws, deeds, or behaviors that subject the populace to difficult living and working conditions, drugs, or dangerous goods. It’s also portrayed as a behavior pattern that is seen as genuine and doesn’t exhibit any particularly criminal traits in contrast to the typical street violence, which is marked by threats of or real assault, rape, robbery, or even homicide, to name a few (Heiner 25).

Case Study: Credit Suisse Scandal

If checks and balances are not put in place, corporate violence will eventually become a violence of the 21st century. Credit Suisse, for instance, used a variety of tricks to rig off the currency markets. The scam was a well-orchestrated ordeal featuring boardroom cartels, running software programs automated to siphon the banking giants’ esteemed customers (Dugan para1).

It programmed eFX, an automated electronic system, to outrun its clients’ accounts on more than 72,000 orders as depicted in the consent order. Trading ahead of a client’s order, otherwise known as front-running, is intensely profitable with the company anticipating huge returns to the tune of $2 million in profits alone. Consequently, the company generated an algorithm which it applied for three consecutive years (2010 to 2013) to predict instances when a client’s orders will stop or run through. The traders, in turn, would get information of the algorithm-related limits so that they can always trade around such limits. To prevent internal wrangles that might leak the scam, the traders conspired to price fixing through boardroom meetings alongside granting a single trader multiple orders (Dugan para 6). They also devoted to sharing information with other banks lying about canceling orders at the last minute if they deemed the orders to be non-profitable.

The effect of such a fraud resulted in the imposition of fines not only with the major scam player, Suisse, but also the conspirators parted way with $4.3 billion settlement (Dugan para 9).

Solutions to Corporate Violence

What bears the burden of corporate violence are the institutions other than the individuals who are the primary organizers of the crimes. What needs to be done is to hold individuals accountable for any crime committed under the disguise of a company (Heiner 14). The penalties should be in the form of freezing the perpetrators’ accounts, their businesses as well as summoning them to the court of law. Imposition of fines alone will not affect the long runs as they could use the amount of money they have laundered to stay at large and continue with their vices. Their trading licenses should be withdrawn for the public good.

Establishing a Reference Bureau of Standards

Secondly, there is a greater need to establish a reference bureau of standards that might act as a public watchdog to prevent the occurrence of any corporate violence. Before any engagement in the financial activity, the agency has to give an operational license, not for the sake of revenue but to provide a benchmark of how the whole enterprise is likely to operate (Heiner 14). Through such incentives, the citizens would be guaranteed a platform where they can seek redress in case of a suspicious activity in their socioeconomic endeavors. They will get immune to financial preys that are scheming to siphon their hard-earned money through fraudulent activities in the guise of abnormal profits.

Works cited

Dugan, Kevin. Credit Suisse used trading software to rip off its own customers. Nov 13th, 2017. Retrieved https://nypost.com/2017/11/13/credit-suisse-used-trading-software-to-rip-off-its-own-customers/

Heiner, Robert. Deviance across cultures. Oxford University Press, USA, 2008.