Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis - Why Incompetence Is Worse Than Greed

"Professor De Bruin has written an important book. For all of the thousands of pages written on the recent global financial crisis, there is very little solid ethical analysis of the underlying causes and concepts. He makes a critical distinction betweenthe motivation of financial actors and their competence, then argues that most of the analysis of the crisis has been about motivation. In particular many have called into question the very idea of capitalism as seeking to maximize profits for shareholders. While DeBruin admits that motivation is an important idea, he traces much of the difficulty to incompetence on the part of multiple stakeholders, who have no real motivation to learn about how the basic ideas in finance actually work"--

List of contents

Foreword; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Financial ethics: virtues in the market; 2. Epistemic ethics: virtues of the mind; 3. Internalizing virtues: the clients; 4. Case study I: primes and subprimes; 5. Incorporating virtue: the banks; 6. Case study II: nerds and quants; 7. Communicating virtues: the raters; 8. Case study III: scores and accounts; Conclusion; Glossary; References; Index.

About the author

Boudewijn de Bruin is Professor of Financial Ethics at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He is a consultant with the financial services industry, has taught in various executive MBA programmes across the world, and is a regular contributor to the media. He runs a large project on Trusting Banks, with Alex Oliver (University of Cambridge) and financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), which draws together philosophers, social scientists, policymakers and finance professionals.

Product details

• Authors: Boudewijn De Bruin, Boudewijn de Bruin
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 12.02.2015
• EAN: 9781107028913
• ISBN: 978-1-107-02891-3
• No. of pages: 244
• Series: Business, Value Creation, and Society; Business, Value Creation, and; Business, Value Creation, and Society
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; Social sciences, law, business > Business > Miscellaneous; Finance, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Business Ethics, Business ethics & social responsibility, Ethics & moral philosophy, Ethics and moral philosophy, Economic and financial crises and disasters, Business ethics and social responsibility