Capitalism is brutally competitive. The ever-changing operating environment can make it hard for even the mightiest of companies to hit their numbers. At the same time, management teams are often under a huge amount of pressure to meet the expectations placed on them by investors. With millions (or billions!) of dollars on the line, this pressure-cooker environment gives managers an incentive to do anything that they can to win -- even if that means cheating.
In the last few decades, we’ve seen some of the largest corporate frauds in U.S. history. Here’s a review of five of the biggest of all time.
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