Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence Is Worse than Greed (Business, Value Creation, and Society)

In this topical book, Boudewijn de Bruin examines the ethical 'blind spots' that lay at the heart of the global financial crisis. He argues that the most important moral problem in finance is not the 'greed is good' culture, but rather the epistemic shortcomings of bankers, clients, rating agencies and regulators. Drawing on insights from economics, psychology and philosophy, de Bruin develops a novel theory of epistemic virtue and applies it to racist and sexist lending practices, subprime mortgages, CEO hubris, the Madoff scandal, professionalism in accountancy and regulatory outsourcing of epistemic responsibility. With its multidisciplinary reach, Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis will appeal to scholars working in philosophy, business ethics, economics, psychology and the sociology of finance. The many concrete examples and case studies mean that this book will also prove useful to policy-makers and regulators. "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 between the 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"-- Provided by publisher This topical book examines the ethical 'blind spots' that lay at the heart of the global financial crisis. Using concrete examples and case studies, the author develops a novel theory of epistemic virtue through which he examines the decision making of key stakeholders - the banks, their clients, rating agencies, and regulators. Examines the decision-making of key stakeholders in the financial services industry through the lens of recent work on epistemic virtues