Corporate market responsibility: ethical regulation for orderly financial markets

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What I’m saying to you is, yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact’
Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, 2008

Discovering Corporate Market Responsibility

Since the 1980s, we have frequently heard the message ‘greed is good’, with the rationale that greed drives efficient markets, which in turn drive economic growth. This particular message has in recent years lost its ironic charm. Since the onset of the financial crisis in 2007-2008, it has become more common to hear that greed is ‘irresponsible’. The British prime minister told the United Nations in September 2008 that the world had lived through an ‘age of irresponsibility’ in financial markets (Brown, 2008), and five months later, the American president heralded a ‘new era of responsibility’, writing: ‘This crisis is neither the result of a normal turn of the business cycle nor an accident of history. We arrived at this point as a result of an era of profound irresponsibility that engulfed both private and public institutions from some of our largest companies’ executive suites to the seats of power in Washington, D.C. For decades, too many on Wall Street threw caution to the wind, chased profits with blind optimism and little regard for serious risks—and with even less regard for the public good …

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