Competence and Ethics

The January 25, 2008 issue of the New York Times had an article, "Fraud Costs Bank $7.1 Billion," by David Jolly. This article describes how a bank employee, Jerome Kerviel, lost billions of dollars in unauthorized trading. The police are making a case against him.

I believe Stan O'Neal at Merrill Lynch and Charles Prince at Citigroup each lost more than $7 Billion for their companies, but they got big bonuses to go away.

Sending some people to jail for losing billions while you reward others for losing billions is crazy. This is part of the Leadership Crisis facing the whole world, not just America.

I say that ethics is a core competence. An unethical businessman is an incompetent businessman.

We need better ethics if we are to avoid another world wide financial depression. The world economy is quickly becoming a house of cards that will collapse precipitously from the right kind of scandalous financial disaster.

Robert Canright