Business Ethics After the Global Financial Crisis

6Freedom in Finance

The Importance of Epistemic Virtues and Interlucent Communication

Boudewijn de Bruin and Richard Endörfer

Introduction

The global financial crisis (GFC) that started in 2007 has made us aware of the vulnerabilities of sellers and buyers of mortgages; for whereas economists have over the years uncovered many larger causal factors of the crisis, there is little doubt that most contemporaneous commentators thought the crisis had started with the ‘subprime mortgage meltdown’. Sub-prime mortgages, the story went, were borrowed by people who couldn’t really afford them from lenders who didn’t care because they knew that they could easily get rid of the risks by selling the mortgages on to structured finance firms that would ...