OSNews

Multi-billion dollar fines would. The problem is humans, and the justice system, which is made up of humans, do not deal with scale well. By the time the fines get into the hundreds of millions of dollars people are thinking "Holy crap! That's a huge amount of money!", when in fact the corporate petty cash accounts' expenditures for the year for the companies being fined might exceed that sum. "

Capitalist states will never allow those type of fines to become a real threat to a multinational corporation anyway. On the other hand, the US wouldn't really have to care much about Asian firms.. but given the fact that Asia is already quite upset about what the US financial system has done to them (I'm referring to the credit meltdown), I think there's a line the US should not cross here. ;-)



There's more to this. The dollar has declined steadily over the past few years, and that hurts Asian corporations who see their revenues decline. Then again, they're not prepared, or too much cowards, to just leave the US market altogether. The irony here is that keeping the revenues on a certain level by illegal price fixing might give US consumers (corporate or the shopping crowd) more of a break than when some of them would have decided to stop exporting to the US for the few crumbs it makes them, driving up the price in the US in the process.
The US market will slowly but steadily disappear for those firms anyway, the American consumer market is not going to be able to afford high-tech imports after the fall of the dollar, when it eventually happens.
The future for firms like LGE is the solar panel market, which will explode. I almost fear they're toostupid to even see that.