Seven Pillars Institute

A New Issue of Moral Cents is Out!

We are close to the five-year anniversary of the global financial crisis, if we take ...

Read More

Bank of America’s Takeover of Merrill Lynch

Bank of America agreed to pay $2.43 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit with investors who ...

Read More

A New Issue of Moral Cents is Online!

Check out the Summer/Fall 2012 issue of Moral Cents.                  Editorial: Moral Cents recently encountered arguments against teaching Finance and Ethics in MBA finance programs, and has rebuttals. Benefit Corporations: Corporations can choose social and environmental good over profits without fear of legal repercussions from shareholders, by incorporating as Benefit Corporations. We may be witnessing a slow cultural (r)evolution, supported by the law, as corporate goals shift from pure profit maximization to producing social and economic good. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in China: The CSR situation ...

Top 15 Points of Democratic Party’s 2012 Finance Platform

1. Rebuild the middle class 2. Invest in infrastructure with savings from winding down overseas wars 3. Invest in and reform education 4. Extend unemployment insurance 5. Cut taxes for the middle class (those earning less than $250,000 year) 6. Increase taxes on the wealthy (those earning more than $250,000 a year) 7. Cut taxes for small businesses that hire veterans 8. Cut taxes for companies in the US and give additional relief to companies that relocate manufacturing and research and development to the US. Discourage off-shoring. 9. Use tax credits to encourage research 10. Preserve Social Security and ...

Top 15 Points of G.O.P.’s Finance Platform

1. Advance free markets 2. Reduce personal and corporate taxes. 3. Constitutional amendment requiring a super majority for any tax increases 4. Reduce federal spending using a tripartite test for every federal activity, and thereby, 5. Reduce the size of big government 6. Rein in union power 7. Audit the Federal Reserve Bank and make it more transparent 8. Enforce free trade by pushing trading partners to open their markets to US goods 9. Stop China’s unfair trade and currency policies 10. Aggressively support small businesses 11. Promote private-public infrastructure development 12. Retain FDIC guarantees on bank deposits but increase banks’ ...

SPIN Summer 2012

The Seven Pillars Institute Newsletter, SPIN, is available for your reading pleasure (SPIN: SPI Newsletter 2012).  This issue reports on the Institute’s summer fundraiser and the achievements of the Institute over the past year. SPIN offers a summary of the engaging talk given by Professor Richard De George, the keynote speaker for the event.  Professor De George is a distinguished scholar, teacher, and founder of business ethics. Share and Enjoy ...

The Desolate History of Ethics in Finance

  Dr. Kara Tan Bhala recently delivered a lecture on, “Ethics in Finance: Its Desolate History and Its Fruitful Future” at the Heidelberg Center in Santiago, Chile. Proyecto ACCESO was a sponsor of the event and kindly provided a video of the lecture. This talk was also given at KAIST Business School in Seoul, Korea. KAIST is one of the first business schools to make “Ethics in Finance” a required course for MBAs who are pursuing a concentration in finance.   Share and Enjoy ...

Interview with Bill Black

Travis Strawn recently interviewed Bill Black for Seven Pillars Institute. William (Bill) Black is a lawyer, academic, author, and a former bank regulator. He developed the concept of ‘control fraud‘, in which a business or national executive uses the entity she controls as a ‘weapon’ to commit fraud. Black was a central figure in exposing Congressional corruption during the Savings and Loan Crisis. Black is the author of, among others, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry. He ...

Let’s Try Free Markets…with Ethics

June was a cruel month for those in high finance and who made poor ethical choices. The list of the month’s charges, convictions, sentences, and ethical lapses run as follows: 1. Barclays Bank fined US$450 million for manipulating the London interbank offered rate (Libor); other top tier banks are being investigated and more charges are likely to follow. Libor is set daily and is a key benchmark rate.  Messing with it is like messing with your interest payments or interest earnings, without your knowing. 2. Rajat Gupta, the former global head of McKinsey ...

Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky Call for New Economic Thinking

The quest of this Institute is to generate change in today’s dominant financial paradigm. The change will entail integration of ethics into finance theory. The foundation of the current paradigm rests on the assumptions that economic agents are rationally self-interested and focused solely on the pursuit of maximum profit. These neo-classical economic assumptions help simplify the world for the purpose of econometric modeling. Alas, over the last six decades, these economic assumptions metamorphosized into values. In other words, the assumptions became the ethic – we should be self-interested and we should pursue ...

A Q&A With Thomas Baxter, General Counsel, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

    Seven Pillars Institute had the pleasure and honor to be an invited delegate to the Qatar Law Forum (http://www.qatarlawforum.com/) held in Doha, Qatar from 4-6 May 2012. The focus of the Forum was change in the Middle East and current challenges in global finance. Over 400 leaders in law from 60 jurisdictions attended the Forum. Chief Justices present included those from the Supreme Courts of Bangladesh, China, England & Wales, Egypt, the Maldives, Libya, Qatar and Rwanda. The Panel on the Arab Awakening had senior representation from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Turkey, ...

The European Debt Crisis: A Symptom of a Chronic Illness and the Nature of the Beast

GUEST POST by Chris Richey, Neosho Capital, LLC From our vantage point at Neosho Capital, the European sovereign debt crisis is actually a symptom of two larger, more intractable, issues: the inherent difficulties of governing a federal entity and the perennial national and cultural tensions that have defined Europe for at least the past 2,000 years. It is our belief that while the short run problems caused by excessive sovereign indebtedness will eventually pass (at some point, either the debt is repaid, or it is in default), we believe Europe faces ...