Ethics and the global financial crisis : why incompetence is worse than greed Boudewijn de Bruin

Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-221) and index.

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