Solidarity for the new global elite is not geography-based or tied up with a state. It insists on solidarity across the nation, with higher tax rates for rich people to help their less fortunate countrymen. But this solidarity is predicated on a sense of national belonging, to which the left is allergic; national identity comes with chauvinism and nationalism, and creepy rightwing supremacists.
Well, the global financial elite agrees. This article was written by Joris Luyendijk, for guardian. Skip to content. The Guardian. Have something to tell us about this article? For those who want to stay in finance, non-bank financial institutions, growth equity firms and smaller financial-services businesses have become better options. Partly because they are less regulated and more nimble, such employers can give young workers a venue to learn how to take risk. Meanwhile, science and engineering grads who once would have been lured into structuring and building quantitative trading models, would rather go work for firms at the cutting edge of technology.
I was speaking to a workhorse-banker friend who began his career almost 15 years ago, when I did. He stayed in the industry long after I decided to leave. Giants of the industry are still around, moving across and around firms, capping growth. He wonders where to go from here. This round of talent-shedding should be a wake-up call: In the post-pandemic era, keeping young employees will be about something more existential than money and perks. Anjani Trivedi is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Asia.
Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our App Now!! It'll just take a moment. Looks like you have exceeded the limit to bookmark the image. Remove some to bookmark this image. You are now subscribed to our newsletters. This is exactly the defence offered by the Panama firms involved in the tax evasion, as well as by the PR departments of financial firms across the West implicated in all this: we did not break any law so we are by definition innocent. Immoral means knowingly breaking the law.
The sign says you can go kilometres, but still you decide to drive A-moral, by contrast, means that your ethical and moral framework is defined by what the law allows. In finance you do not ask if a proposal is morally right or wrong. It means you do not let emotions get in the way of work, let alone moral beliefs — those are for home. Almost every interviewee brought this up.
Like most global corporations today, they explained, big global banks are owned by shareholders such as pension funds and insurers.
These demand from banks that they make as much profit as they can, within the law. Those profits are the sole criterion by which shareholders judge a bank. So, bankers would ask me, how do you expect us to behave ethically when our owners simply look at two things: is it profitable and is it legal? These numbers make you look like a bad investor. It is legal so what is to stop us? This, then, is the corporate universe that produces tax evasion for the rich on an industrial scale.
Those on the inside have absolved themselves of moral responsibility and at least in the interviews my counter arguments seemed to hold no sway: how can you hide behind the law if your sector has such an influence in writing the law?
Think of campaign donations and finance — basically political corruption. And think of the huge financial lobby, employing thousands of people in Washington, London, Brussels and other regulatory centres. And those lobbyists, too, will tell you: what I do is legal, so I must be innocent. It is a depressing picture and morality in this context becomes almost a life-style option.
One of the most interesting interviewees was someone specialised in building built financial instruments to avoid taxes.
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