Global financial institutions, ethics and market fundamentalism

The global financial crisis (GFC) sparked by the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers has entered a new phase, namely that of sovereign debt. It is not simply investment banks and other financial institutions that are insolvent or bankrupt and in need of government bailouts, it is now whole economies that are actually or potentially insolvent and in need of bailouts by other governments and/or organisations such as the IMF. Most recently, Greece has made the headlines and there is media speculation and market jitters in relation to Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Moreover, this all comes in the wake of the sovereign debt crises very recently faced by Iceland and Dubai. As with the first phase, the crisis has been revealed to have been due in large part to gross financial over-leveraging, regulatory negligence (e.g., of German banks) and a host of other unethical practices such as, in effect, ‘cooking the books’ in the case of the Greek government. Moreover, this new phase is related to the first, in that a significant increase in sovereign debt has been incurred as a consequence of bailing out failed or failing financial institutions to the tune of trillions of dollars. This ongoing GFC is evidently the worst since the Great Depression, and the second phase is in some respects more alarming than the first, given that while governments typically can bail out banks, it is unclear whether ultimately they can or are willing to bail out other governments.