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.

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.

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 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.

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