In the US corporations are considered people.
Corporate personhood is the status conferred upon corporations exclusively under the law of the United States, which allows corporations to have rights and responsibilities similar to those of a natural person. There is a question about which subset of rights afforded to natural persons should also be afforded to corporations as legal persons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
At some point in the not too distant future we are going to have self-aware robots that are in many ways more intelligent then we are.
Bot's are already doing a pretty good job of manipulating markets, currently humans control limited functionality bots, what happens when the bots are self aware and can run the corporations and do the trading without our being involved
Here's some spooky examples of what's coming...
