ABSTRACT
The accounts of why neoliberal capitalist state apparatuses habitually award criminal impunity or decriminalize and fail to prevent or regulate much of the harmful behaviour of financial and economic crime supports Frank Pearce’s thesis of departure that the capitalist state does not typically pursue those crimes of the powerful that do not threaten the wellbeing of the capitalist political-economic order. Accordingly, financially powerful delinquents generally “manage to keep their anti-social acts hidden from public scrutiny” or “failing that, have them dealt with administratively” because the ensuing injuries and victimizations for these types of criminal wrongdoing have been unable to effectively challenge those routinized non-criminal policies of compensation and punishment. By reviewing the case of the worldwide scandals of the rigging of the interbank interest rates and the systemic lack of crime control applied to these securities frauds and other associated crimes, this chapter also reflects on the broader understanding of the aetiology of the crimes of the powerful and on whether or not “crime and crime control” are necessarily fundamental to the power mongering of both global capital and the capitalist state.
