This paper conducts an ethical analysis of the 2008 closure of a US money market fund entitled the reserve primary fund, which triggered the first run in the money market sector and a resultant liquidity crisis that harmed the entire US financial system. Although many academics and regulators have studied and written about RPF, the question whether the decision that caused the fund to collapse represented any ethical dilemma, has not been addressed to date. With this purpose in mind, the (...) paper will examine the events that culminated in the closure of RPF according to Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics approach. In so doing, the paper aims to extend the applicability of MacIntyre’s concepts to the finance industry in general, and to provide a framework to predict and so potentially prevent crises like that exemplified by the RPF case. (shrink)

In this paper we have two main goals. The first is to challenge two key elements of reductionist thinking concerning human work inherited from the Information and Communication Technology revolution that have significantly shaped current concepts of work at both the individual and institutional level: the ‘flexible man’ model and the obsession with the objective function of economic productivity. We show how, combined with the logic of productivity as a means for continuous economic growth, these elements justify the overlapping of (...) value and price. This overlap characterizes current meritocratic paradigms. Our second goal is to show how and why an emerging integrated paradigm is a more suitable model for taking into consideration the specifically human dimensions of work. These dimensions encompass the sphere of caring and are mostly buried in the functionalist-mechanistic system. In this context, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic can work as an exogenous shock useful to boost the rise of this new paradigm of human work. (shrink)

AbstractDuring the last 20 years, the financial sector has undergone an unprecedented transformation due to new regulations and the implementation of several technological advancements. The combination of regulation and technology has brought about new financial processes that have fundamentally changed how financial market making is done. This paper studies the ethics of financial market making and its implications for one of the most controversial financial innovations of modern times, namely high-frequency trading (HFT). We claim that the Aristotelian distinction between natural (...) chrematistics, which is aimed at serving the real economy, and unnatural chrematistics, whose ultimate purpose is wealth accumulation, can be a useful criterion to assess the ethics of financial market making and the goodness of an innovation as HFT, and how it can serve the common good of society. This approach can be defined as ‘purpose oriented’ or ‘purpose fulfillment’. (shrink)