As part of its upcoming settlement with the federal government and other agencies, JPMorgan is reportedly on the verge of paying thirteen billion dollars in fines and restitutions, and of admitting that some of its businesses violated laws during the great credit bubble. What’s wrong with forcing it to pay that amount, or even billions more? Perhaps nothing. The big banks are so unpopular these days that there would be widespread support for doubling to the number, to twenty-six billion, or tripling it, to thirty-nine billion. Or, what the heck, why don’t we make it a nice round number: fifty billion dollars?

Am I serious? Not entirely. But there’s no doubt that JPMorgan could afford to pay significantly more than thirteen billion dollars. Last year, the giant bank generated close to twenty-nine billion dollars in operating income, and more than twenty-one billion dollars in net profit. If its behavior has been so egregious and damaging to the economy, why not impose what would be, in effect, a hundred-per-cent tax on its profits for a year or two? To avoid a panic in the markets, or a run on JPMorgan’s bonds, the government could give Jamie Dimon and his colleagues an extended period in which to pay up. At five billion dollars a year for ten years, even a fifty-billion-dollar fine wouldn’t necessarily be crippling.

I am not recommending such an idea, although it is quite tempting. I’m simply using some big numbers to illustrate a couple of the implications of this sort of legal settlement. Once the figures reach a certain level, they risk becoming almost arbitrary. Given the immense profits that big multinational corporations make these days, and the pressure on politicians to punish them for their sins, there is a clear tendency for the settlements to increase in size, seemingly without bounds.

Indeed, we seem to have stumbled into a new form of corporate regulation, in which nobody in the executive suite is held personally accountable for wrongdoing lower down the ranks, but the corporation and its stockholders are periodically socked with huge fines for past abuses. Such a system is not necessarily anathema to C.E.O.s, such as Dimon, who don’t lose their jobs or land in court or see their corporate fiefdoms broken up. It also has some advantages for the politicians, who get to dispense large sums of money.

But is this an effective means of accomplishing what criminal-justice systems are supposed to accomplish—punishing the guilty and deterring wrongdoers? I am not sure.

What I know for certain is that corporate litigation is one part of the economy where inflation is rampant. In 1991, Exxon paid nine hundred million dollars to settle the federal and state claims arising from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Twelve years later, ten Wall Street firms, including JPMorgan, agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle charges arising from Eliot Spitzer’s investigation into conflicts of interest between stocks analysts and investment bankers. Both of these fines seemed large when they were imposed, but from today’s perspective they seem almost trivial.

A fact-filled post on the Wall Street Journal’s Money Beat blog illustrates the recent trend. In 2009, Pfizer pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of illegally marketing the painkiller Bextra, and paid $2.3 billion in fines. In July of last year, GlaxoSmithKline, another big pharmaceutical company, shelled out $3 billion and pleaded guilty to illegally marketing drugs and withholding safety data from regulators. Then there’s BP. Last November, in a settlement with the Justice Department arising from the 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the British oil company pleaded guilty to eleven felony counts of “seaman’s manslaughter” and agreed to pay $4.5 billion. (That sum doesn’t come close to accounting for BP’s over-all legal costs. In May of 2012, it agreed to pay about $7.8 billion to settle tens of thousands of individual claims. And a court case in New Orleans is currently being held to decide how much BP will pay the government to settle civil charges.)

On Wall Street, the escalation in settlement terms has been equally noticeable. Four years after the not-guilty verdicts in the trial of Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, two hedge-fund managers at Bear Stearns, the government has yet to bring another criminal case against anybody on Wall Street who was directly involved in the subprime boom. But the big banks have paid large fines, some of which were related to wrongdoing at firms they acquired after the property bubble burst.

In 2010, Goldman Sachs paid $550 million to settle the Fabrice (Fabulous Fab) Tourre case with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The case included claims that the firm had conspired with John Paulson, the hedge-fund titan, to mislead investors in a C.D.O. offering. Goldman didn’t admit to any violation, and today it looks like it got a bargain. Neither Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive, nor an of his colleagues at the top of the firm faced any real sanction. Certainly, other banks have ended up laying out a lot more cash. For example, in June, 2011, Bank of American agreed to pay $8.5 billion to a group of investors, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who had purchased subprime securities constructed from home loans issued by Countrywide Financial, which Bank of America purchased in 2008.

There have also been some huge group settlements. In February, 2012, five of the biggest mortgage-service firms in the country—Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Ally Bank/GMAC—agreed to a $25 billion settlement with state and federal regulators arising from charges that they inflated fees, robo-signed foreclosure documents, and carried out multiple other improprieties during the housing boom and bust. About two-thirds of this huge sum was supposed to go toward mortgage relief for struggling homeowners. Roughly $2.5 billion was reserved for the states. Then, earlier this year, thirteen banks and mortgage-service providers—Bank of America and JPMorgan were again on the list—agreed to pay another $9.3 billion to settle cases brought by federal regulators.

Not all of the fines have been mortgage related. Late last year, UBS agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle charges from the Libor scandal, and HSBC agreed to pay $1.9 billion to settle money-laundering charges. And, in the past month or so, JPMorgan has agreed to pay more than a billion dollars to settle two cases arising from the London Whale trading scandal.

Compared to the new settlement, which was reportedly raised from eleven billion dollars to thirteen billion during last-minute negotiations, the London Whale fines weren’t much at all. As part of the deal between Attorney General Eric Holder and Dimon, federal prosecutors in Sacramento will be allowed to continue trying to make a criminal case against some current and former JPMorgan employees, who were reportedly involved in mortgage-related shenanigans. Holder, to his credit, refused to back down on this one. However, there remains little prospect of anybody very senior at the bank being indicted or, it seems, of Dimon losing his job.

As I said, holding the C.E.O. personally liable doesn’t appear to be a feature of the new system of regulation that’s emerged willy-nilly in the past few years. Instead, the corporation and its stockholders pay the price. Certainly, that’s better than having no accountability at all: after this latest settlement, nobody could suggest that the Justice Department has gone easy on JPMorgan in a monetary sense. But it is people, not corporate abstractions, that break the law, and it is the people at the very top of the corporations who set the rules and the tone for everybody else to follow.

Until this reality is recognized, simply lumping companies with big fines years after the fact won’t necessarily make much difference in how they behave. And if a company is too large for any individual to manage in a way that prevents widespread abuses, as seems to be the case with the big banks, then maybe the government should tackle that problem directly.

Above: Jamie Dimon after meeting with Barack Obama on October 2nd. Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty.