The "market" is usually caveat emptor - the buyer has to take into consideration how much they trust the seller. On top of that, society has some laws against fraud that make lying more harmful to the seller. That means the buyer can have some amount of faith in the seller. For publicly traded companies, this goes a lot further. The SEC is supposed to create an environment with reasonable auditing and pretty harsh penalties for lying. This is supposed to facilitate a huge amount of business, since all the businesses can trust each other a lot more (when the stakes would otherwise be high enough to attempt fraud). So really the only thing preventing fraud at that scale is the SEC, and if it's compromised in any way, we're kinda doomed.
I read an article a few years ago that correlated the desirability to do business in a country with the perceived likelihood of fairness and low corruption in institutions and government. The US was high (possibly first?) in that ranking.
I wonder at what point that starts to change for us?
That may have been something out of the World Bank, the Doing Business team.
Sadly the low corruption high fairness perception times are long past - the likes of NZ and Scandinavian countries now dominate the lists. However the US is still the biggest economy, so will continue to attract huge investment. The big alternatives are not scoring highly in low corruption and fairness either.
