This financial crisis is a great opportunity to illustrate the importance of ethics and moral decisions. This may sound kind of uncool and patrionising but let's see if there's something to it. Money and ethics seem to be incompatible and everyone who demands that this dimension is taken into account is regarded as some left wing/idealist/bohemian/socialist whatever. The convenient thing about this kind of labelling is that the discussion never revolves around the actual topic. In this case the question would be 'are business and ethics related and if yes how'? Normally ethics is seen as something that spoils business opportunities. In terms of business the whole economy would have been better off now, had the dimension of ethics been part of the game. Without having any deeper knowledge about ethics I'm sure that most people would agree, that it's unethical to offer mortgages to people without income, jobs or any other assets. Playing up their hopes and than enslaving them so that they pay back the interest and the mortgage is wrong. If things go wrong (like they have now), the home owners end up being bankrupt and without any kind of housing. This is not difficult to understand. But it seems difficult not to take advantage of people. This has worked until now and people have been losing their houses ever since but since the banks could just sell the houses on a booming market this was never a newsworthy fact. Well now that not just some but a huge number of people can't pay their mortgages back and the banks are piling up losses or going bankrupt themselves it is suddenly very interesting.
Currently the banks are putting their efforts into developing better risk management strategies. While this might help it is not nearly as good as thinking over their strategies in the light of ethics. This is not about utopia, it's a very real necessity. Because shady deals can and do blow up in your face. People can't pay back, they sue you or a major damage in reputation can destroy the trust in a company. Mopping up the mess requires usually more money than critically examining a deal before sealing it. This is also something that shareholders have to learn. If you don't care how a company makes its profits as long as the shares rise, you're going to be the first to feel it, if these imbalances cause the bubble to burst. That's why values such as integrity came into existance in the first place.
