Banking, ethics and sustainability: the need for a self-critical look at corporate social responsibility strategies

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Can we still speak of ethics and finance?

It all started in August 2007 – to be precise, on 9 August 2007, when one of Spain’s leading newspapers published the news of the subprime meltdown. From this point on, a series of events was unleashed that would culminate in the greatest financial and economic crisis to hit Spain, and the rest of the world, since the Second World War. And at first the source seemed quite unexpected: the banking and mortgage sector.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo was to state that, between 9 and 11 August 2007, the European Central Bank alone put 155,000 million euros into circulation after the famous crises in such financial institutions as BNP Paribas and the German bank Sachsen LB. In September El Mundo wrote that the crisis had bottomed out with the failure of the British bank Northern Rock. This was followed by shocking results for banks in general, and Citigroup and Morgan Stanley (complete with resignations) in particular. And while the general public in Spain – and many other countries – were struggling to grasp what a ‘subprime’ mortgage was, and what the fall-out might be, what is now known as the ‘subprime crisis’ was starting to trigger a major worldwide downturn in a jittery credit sector, the pillar of the market economy.

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