Sound business principles have always embraced ethical ones. The current financial crisis simply highlights what terrible risks and consequences attend us all when important sectors of business throw away ethics as outmoded.

<Click for more>

Ben, a Fellow of The Centre for Policy Development and National Affairs Correspondent of NewMatilda.com, proposes that we need to re-invent the whole discipline of economics and how we shape what we do as a consequence. The financial crisis is forcing us to re-evaluate how morality, economics and politics and the institutions that sustain them relate to one another. Ben draws on all the great economists from the past, distant and near, to argue that the connection with morality is the crucial challenge we face.

<Click for more>

Philip Hagan, a professional economist, reflects on the concrete details of financing. Commissions in this context, he argues, have been a clear contributor to creating the financial crisis. Charging structures condition behaviour in very important ways and commissions create structures which reduce responsibility, in many cases to nullity.

<Click for more>

An economist at Macquarie University looks at the issue of executive pay. Growing inequality is not, according to Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, a result of market forces but rather a product of politics. Higher degrees of equality are achieved by the action of three main institutions: taxes, unions and industrial relations systems. Recovery from the Great Depression came with careful attention to all three.

<Click for more>

The global financial crisis has now graduated on to have its own acronym: The GFC! Reforms to the global financial system must take the issue of greed head on. We cannot afford to continue feeling powerless to confront it or change it.

<Click for more>