Eh.. There are oceans of phone recordings and emails that got seized via court order detailing rampantly criminal behavior having gotten utterly normalized.
HCBC being effectively an arm of the drug cartels, the interbank rate setting scandal, the entire CDO debacle and the way business was conducted during the runup to the crisis, the hilarious interoffice memos of goldman sacks. There is no end to it, and the settlements levied against these criminal enterprises are mostly a bad joke—as they are almost invariably smaller than the proceeds of the crime. Finance is operating in a fun-house reality where you can steal 100 million, pay a 40 million fine and walk away laughing, and as a result very large parts of the finance industry has predictably decayed to the point of being a criminal enterprise. If pointing this out is agitprop.. We kind of need more agitprop. ¨
The high burnout rates are actually very encouraging - it strengthens my faith in the better nature of people.
It seems like it might be worth distinguishing between “this is an industry with a lot of scandalously bad behaviour” and “everything about this industry is bad”. It’s clear that the first of these is true of finance, and I bet it always was and always will be. The second is what you seem to be claiming. It doesn’t follow from the first.
The level of bad behavior is not an invariable constant over time and location, but follows from local values - the social norms that mean that some things are just not done, and secondly, the effectiveness of law enforcement against violations of formal rules. Both of those are at a depressing nadir at the present time. (in the english speaking finance world)
Eh.. There are oceans of phone recordings and emails that got seized via court order detailing rampantly criminal behavior having gotten utterly normalized.
HCBC being effectively an arm of the drug cartels, the interbank rate setting scandal, the entire CDO debacle and the way business was conducted during the runup to the crisis, the hilarious interoffice memos of goldman sacks. There is no end to it, and the settlements levied against these criminal enterprises are mostly a bad joke—as they are almost invariably smaller than the proceeds of the crime. Finance is operating in a fun-house reality where you can steal 100 million, pay a 40 million fine and walk away laughing, and as a result very large parts of the finance industry has predictably decayed to the point of being a criminal enterprise. If pointing this out is agitprop.. We kind of need more agitprop. ¨
The high burnout rates are actually very encouraging - it strengthens my faith in the better nature of people.
It seems like it might be worth distinguishing between “this is an industry with a lot of scandalously bad behaviour” and “everything about this industry is bad”. It’s clear that the first of these is true of finance, and I bet it always was and always will be. The second is what you seem to be claiming. It doesn’t follow from the first.
The level of bad behavior is not an invariable constant over time and location, but follows from local values - the social norms that mean that some things are just not done, and secondly, the effectiveness of law enforcement against violations of formal rules. Both of those are at a depressing nadir at the present time. (in the english speaking finance world)
Don’t forget incentives.