The crisis: wasted opportunities?

The crisis of 2007-2009 has called into question the whole ‘raison d’être’ of the financialization process that, during the last 30 years, has made finance the nerve centre of the global economy and world society. Even if, today, knee-jerk practices and habits may be quickly re-emerging, the fundamental doubts and worries that have been aroused will not just go away. If this doubt is taken seriously, it may enable the world’s socioeconomic system to revive. If, on the contrary, this groundswell of ideas is stifled, the crisis of 2007-2009 may simply prove to have been a dress rehearsal for a wholesale collapse of the system in years to come. Speakers and participants at the “Ethics, Finance & Responsibility” workshops will analyse and debate changes and questions that the crisis has – or maybe could have had – inspired in various fields.

Workshops:

• How banks are trying to woo back their clients
• Finance and the real economy
• Financial ethics after the crisis
• What’s left of our economic models?
• Economy: the dismal science? Keynote speech, Emilio Fontela Lecture

Award Ceremony of the «Ethics in Finance, Robin Cosgrove Prize»

Spirit of Ethics, Finance & Responsibility international meetings In a context of a finance always more globalized, it seems easier to refuge oneself in reassuring paradigms, and to evacuate the question of the impact of one’s decision on the common good. In an institutional and individual level, the measures used in taking decisions are too often resumed in profitability concerns. The notion of responsibility is reduced to a legal dimension and the word ethics to some deontological rules.

For that reason the Observatoire de la Finance aims at organize annual international meetings on Ethics, Finance & Responsibility, since 2002.

The principal purpose of these meetings, articulated around some workshops, is to give a range of examples and analysis to face the question of the link between finance and ethics. In fact, nowadays, is really important to strengthen the financial operators’ judgment in order to make their decisions responsible and ethically founded.

Speakers come from all Europe and sometimes from United States or some African Countries. They are financial professional and academic professors.