But corporate scandals of recent years have clearly shown that the plethora of laws of the past century have not eliminated the less-savory side of human behavior. We should not be surprised then to see a re-emergence of the market value placed on trust and personal reputation in business practice.
After the revelations of corporate malfeasance, the market punished the stock prices of those corporations whose behaviors had cast doubt on the reliability of  BIS Review 22/2004  1  their reputations. Recent allegations on Wall Street of breaches of trust or even legality, if true, could begin to undermine the very basis on which the world’s greatest financial markets thrive.