Moral Blindness on Wall Street

[Joanne98]

One of the most shocking elements of the testimony by Goldman Sachs executives this week was the moral blindness they showed when evaluating the economic collapse and the role of their firm in that catastrophe. Over and over again, the Goldman executives excused their role in the greatest downturn since the Great Depression as simply "market makers," as if that would exempt them from the most basic moral standards.

Since they were nothing but "market makers," argue the executives, they should not be held responsible for the most egregious kinds of conflict of interest, in this case aggressively selling of billions of dollars of synthetic collateralized debt obligations without disclosing to the buyers, the rating agencies or the regulators not only that they were "shorting" these products, but they had actually worked with a hedge fund to dump the most risky securities into the swaps.

What passes for morality on Wall Street is certainly as strange as the synthetic CDO's themselves. After all, who died and made Goldman and the other investment banks the singular gods of the American financial system? Clearly, the idea that we could ever trust Wall Street to be the sole, unregulated market makers of American finance is ridiculous, even though eight years of Republican rule apparently convinced these tarnished titans that they could rule without the slightest moral compass.

The fact that Goldman and the other investment banks ruled the financial roost does not justify their blatant conflicts of interest, unbridled greed and manipulation of the risk markets. The Senate hearings may have demonstrated not only that products like synthetic CDOs are complicated beyond comprehension, but that they represent a complete divorce of Wall Street from both common sense and simple morality.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hoyt-hilsman/moral-blindness-on-wall-s_b_554369.html

[barbtries]

1. i watched it (at work, sporadically)

imagine these well-educated, rich people with not a moral bone, not a single empathetic bone, in their body. it was quite striking. you might even believe that they believe they earned their obscene bonuses and certainly i did not get the impression that any one of the people i watched testify have struggled for a second with the way the consequences of their fucked up actions have come home to roost for so many innocent people.

they're not just morally blind, they are deaf, dumb, empty.

[Kablooie]

2. They are like French aristocrats before the revolution.

To them greed is moral and good because money is the measure of a person's worth.
To grab more money is moral because it makes you a more worthwhile person.

And by that standard, ordinary people have no money so are inferior beings of no importance.

Destroying other's lives to make yourself richer is moral because you become a better, more worthwhile person and the person whos lives are destroyed had no value in the first place so it doesn't matter.

[bemildred]

3. It's not "moral blindness", they know perfectly well what they are doing.

And it's exactly what they want to do.

[katty]

4. Moral Blindness? more calculated greed