A Time for Ethical Self-Assessment

This may be the season of giving, but it sure feels like everybody is suddenly on the take. Siemens, the German engineering giant, agreed this month to pay a record $1.6 billion to U.S. and European authorities to settle charges that it routinely used bribes and kickbacks to secure public works contracts across the globe. Prominent New York attorney Marc Dreier—called by one U.S. prosecutor a “Houdini of impersonation and false documents”—has been accused by the feds of defrauding hedge funds and other investors out of $380 million.

And then, of course, there’s financier Bernard L. Madoff, who is said to have confessed to a Ponzi scheme of truly epic proportions: a swindle of $50 billion, an amount roughly equal to the GPD of Luxembourg.