Disorganized Crimes (PDF)

Bernard Munk received his PhD and MA in economics and a BA in history at the University of Chicago, USA. He founded several production and trading companies for agricultural and meat products and then migrated to the petroleum industry. By means of a leveraged buyout, he and his partner acquired a large petroleum terminal and a pipeline management company and began a fuel oil distribution company serving east coast utilities in the late 1980s and after selling this company to a NYSE company, in 1992 he became an adjunct Professor of Management at the Wharton School initiating a core curriculum course in Geopolitics. He then formed a financial advisory company providing consulting services to investment banks. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia where he has written and spoken on economic policy and energy policy. He has published in academic and trade journals and for a number of years maintained a blog at www.ecomentary.com that will resume shortly following publication of this book.

'Dr Munk's book covers governance issues from a truly economic perspective. As a result of the financial crisis, many have discarded economics to find guiding principles to frame regulation of corporations and financial entities. I learned and thought about many issues as a result of reading this impressive book that highlight and illustrate how these principles, including the responsibilities of boards of directors and corporate officials, interact and how incentives and penalties impact the relations among the various stakeholders of the firm.'

- Myron S. Scholes, Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, USA

'Bernie Munk concludes that the most important failure of American capitalism is that corporate boards have defaulted on their responsibility to protect the shareholders from the excessive risk taking by management. Hundreds of managements have 'cooked the books' by the seemingly innocuous practice of smoothing quarterly earnings. Some boards including Enron's were corrupted by the top managers, hundreds have been co-opted.

Munk provides a long list of policy remedies to shift the primary allegiance of boards to the shareholders. One start would be to establish a new institution that would score the success of boards of the largest 100 and then the largest 500 public firms in representing shareholder interests.

A powerful and timely read.'

- Robert Z. Aliber, Professor of International Finance and Economics Emeritus, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, USA

'Bernard Munk brings one of the most incisive minds in the world of business to the analysis of modern-day corporate governance. He is a master at critiquing the people and process weaknesses in the system and pointing the way to a more constructive higher ground, one in which all stakeholders of a 21st century corporation will benefit. His book should be high on the