The Present Use of the Future: Management and Production of Risk on Financial Markets
Call for ethics and disorientation in the markets seem to proceed in parallel. From a sociological point of view the appeal to ethic is quite problematic: it is difficult to translate ethical values into decision programs and moralizing itself tends to ha
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Reference to Ethics and Intransparency of the Markets The debate on ethics, both in the academy and in public opinion, in recent times increasingly refers to financial markets. And these markets present at the same time evident problems of control and management, which tend to extend to the economy as a whole and apparently don’t find a solution. In front of the crisis in recent years, and especially in front of the attempts to react to it, the awareness spreads that we don’t have the proper tools not only to effectively govern finance and its movements, but not even to understand the ongoing phenomena. Never as in recent decades there was a multiplication of models that promise to control financial risk, which should therefore be prepared to face the movements of the markets, but never as in this period crisis are difficult to manage and to interpret. Call for ethics and disorientation in the markets seem to proceed in parallel. This is hardly just a coincidence. Nobody really understands what’s going on, which dynamics are developing nor how they can be controlled. In this situation the call for ethics (or the recrimination for the lack of ethics) is one of the few claims that seem to find consensus. The need for ethical reflection looks convincing, and the appeals are proliferating. This happens mostly in two dimensions. First, and this is the most immediate aspect with nearly unanimous consensus: the accusation of the immoderate greed of operators (of speculators, traders or the CEOs of big corporations), who abandoned any measure of fairness and proportion in their quest for profit, being culpably guided only by a huge lust for profit. Second, the call for ethics should curb the increasingly evident detachment of finance from the “real” fundamentals of the economy, from production and
E. Esposito () Facoltà di Scienze della Comunicazione e dell’Economia, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, viale Allegri n.15, I-42100 Reggio Emilia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] C. Luetge and J. Jauernig (eds.), Business Ethics and Risk Management, Ethical Economy 43, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7441-4__2, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2014
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from the availability of goods. According to the accusation, in the increasingly abstract and esoteric traffic of derivatives and of the other complex instruments of structured finance any link has been lost between Wall Street and Main Street, and consequently the movements of finance proceed without control and no longer aim at the regulation and the efficiency of the real economy. Computerized and formalized finance works autarchic and self-referential – hence apparently without any constraint (partly because it doesn’t want them, and partly because regulators do not have the necessary tools and do not even really understand what’s going on). The result is a widespread demonization of finance (and often even of financial operators): a sphere of society seen as tendencially parasitic, following selfishly its own purposes completely separated fr
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