Business Ethics After the Global Financial Crisis

3On the Morality of Banking, the Exploitation Tradition and the New Challenges of the Global Financial Crisis

Adrian Walsh

Introduction

The global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008 was a crisis of both governance and morality. The crisis demonstrated unequivocally the need within the financial sector not only for proper regulatory oversight by governments and statutory bodies but also the need for greater attention to the morality of banking (see Herzog, 2017, for an overview of the arguments as to why greater regulation is required). Of course, many of those working in finance have been explicitly opposed to the very idea of a morality of banking due in no small part to their commitments to the related ideas that finance is a ‘morality-free ...