After the corporate scandals of Enron, WorldCom and the rest, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a well-meaning reform that imposes enormous reporting burdens on companies, costing them as much as $65 billion, says Financial Executives International.
The Conservative party's pledge to hand power to ordinary people and communities is pretty meaningless in today's Britain, where the top 10% own 100 times more wealth than the bottom 10%, and in which big business wields such enormous power (Report, 13 April).
However, there was enormous variability reported on the extent of the problem.
Their rules, moan the banks, have forced them to report enormous losses, and it's just not fair.
The psychological costs of this can be enormous and survivors report living with the daily fear of reprisal.
Studies report enormous disruption in families with multiples, and higher levels of social isolation, exhaustion and depression in mothers of twins.
Market value isn't the only yardstick that can sometimes give a distorted view of corporate size.* It is possible for an energy trading company with no more than a few dozen employees to report enormous revenue over the course of a year.
The prime minister has a network of intermediaries, made up of old university friends and charity foundations, that has allowed him to accumulate enormous wealth, the report says.
And Uber defenders point to much larger, public companies, which still operate under much the same model: Amazon, for instance, has a market cap of $250bn, but regularly reports annual losses, and rarely reports enormous profits.
Big diversified oil companies are reporting enormous profits but they are receiving what seems to be a record amount of grief.
