What are the economic and moral connections between Wall Street and the overall economy? This book chronicles the transformation of Wall Street's business model from serving clients to proprietary trading and explains how this shift undermined the ethical foundations of the modern financial industry.

This book examines the decision-making of key stakeholders in the financial services industry through the lens of recent work on epistemic virtues.

The global financial crisis (GFC) that began in 2007 concentrated attention on the morality of banking and financial activities. Just as mainstream businesses became increasingly defined by their financial performance, banks, it seemed, got themselves – and everyone else – into trouble through an over-emphasis on themselves as commercial enterprises that need pay little attention to traditional banking virtues or ethics. While the GFC had many causes, criticism was legitimately levelled at banks over the ethics of mortgage creation, excessive securitisation, executive remuneration, and high-pressure customer sales tactics, amongst other things. These criticisms mirror those that have been levelled at the business more generally, particular in the last decade, although the backdrop provided by the GFC is more dramatic, and the outcomes of supposed wrongdoing more severe. This book focuses on business ethics after the GFC; not on the crisis itself, but how we should respond to it. The GFC has focused minds on the proper role of ethics in the understanding and conduct of business activity, but it is essential to look beyond the crisis to address the deeper challenges that it highlights. The aim of this volume is to present examples of the latest philosophically-informed thinking across a range of ethical issues that relate to business activity, using the banks and the GFC – the consequences of which continue to reverberate – as a point of departure. The book will be of great value to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students interested in business, ethics in general, and business ethics in particular.

During the ongoing global financial crisis, a lack of moral and ethical leadership in society has been exposed. The Most Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and Larry Elliott, The Guardian , bring together their thoughts on the issues of ethics and morality in business, with contributions from leading business figures.

The Ethics of Banking analyzes the systemic and the ethical mistakes that led to the crisis. It keeps the middle ground between excusing all failures by the argument of a systemic crisis not to be taken responsibility for by the financial managers and the moralistic reproach that only moral failure is at the origin of the crisis. It investigates the role of speculation in the formation of the crisis and distinguishes between productive speculation for hedging and for securing market liquidity on the one hand, and unproductive and even detrimental hyper-speculation going far beyond of the degree of speculation that is necessary in a developed economy for the liquidity of financial markets, on the other hand. Hyper-speculation has increased the risks of the financial system and is still doing so.

The 2007-09 financial crisis and economic downturn inflicted considerable hardship on the U.S. population. This book argues that the financial crisis and ensuing recession reflected not just a malfunctioning of the financial system - but also inequalities and insecurities in access to livelihoods that favor well-off groups and leave ordinary people shouldering undue burdens of downside risk. This book, a collection of original papers by leading social economists and scholars in related fields, examines social, distributional, and ethical dimensions of the downturn. It should be of broad interest to the social-science and economic-policy communities.

Psychopaths are little understood outside of the criminal image. However, as the recent global financial crisis highlighted, the behavior of a small group of managers can potentially bring down the entire western system of business. This book investigates who they are, why they do what they do and what the consequences of their presence are.

Presents real world case studies exploring the complex challenges that cause ethical failures and the means available to overcome them with integrity. Resisting Corporate Corruption teaches business ethics in a manner very different from the philosophical and legal frameworks that dominate graduate schools. The book offers twenty-eight case studies and nine essays that cover a full range of business practice, controls and ethics issues. The essays discuss the nature of sound financial controls, root causes of the Financial Crisis, and the evolving nature of whistleblower protections. The cases are framed to instruct students in early identification of ethics problems and how to work such issues within corporate organizations. They also provide would-be whistleblowers with instruction on the challenges they'd face, plus information on the legal protections, and outside supports available should they embark on that course. Some of the cases illustrate how 'The Young are the Most Vulnerable,' i.e. short service employees are most at risk of being sacrificed by an unethical firm. Other cases show the ethical dilemmas facing well-known CEOs and the alternatives they can employ to better combine ethical conduct and sound business strategy. Through these case studies, students should emerge with a practical toolkit that better enables them to follow their moral compass. "This third edition to Resisting Corporate Corruption is a must read for all students of American capitalism and specifically anyone considering a career on Wall Street or in public company finance and M&A." —Sherron Watkins, from the Foreword

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.

This book addresses the causes and consequences of the international financial crisis of 2008. A range of esteemed contributors explore developments in the United States, where the crisis of 2008 originated, as well as the smallest country affected, Iceland, by evaluating developments since 2008. Currently, many countries are facing similar problems as Iceland did in 2008: this book is of interest to economists and policy makers in these countries to study what happened in Iceland, and why the recovery of that economy was strong and swift. The chapters in this book originate from panel discussions and conferences and explore areas including regulation, state projects and inflation.