Reconstructing ethical conduct within financial firms

This chapter explores whether ethical cultures can be created within a financial market context. Ongoing regulatory and legal actions, and press coverage of these, suggest that a definition of ethical problems in terms of ‘rogue traders’ and ‘bad apples’ would be inadequate, since entire business areas have been resorting to collusive illegal behaviour. The concept of ‘bad barrels’ seems to capture the situation rather better: the culture of firms fails to discourage transgression and indeed supports it. Unpacking the links between regulatory objectives and the cultural settings of firms and their employees, this chapter questions the chances of success of measures such as enhanced controls on individuals and restructured reward mechanisms. Financial firms typically have very flat, nodal structures, within which traders conceptualise themselves as an elite, in contrast to back office staff and also in contrast to managers. Traders’ functions and their occupational mobility mean that their linkages and attachments may be much stronger with others outside ‘their’ firm than their firm and those within it. Performance, camaraderie and their linkages are important in all work situations, yet all the more so for traders in financial markets. Thus, whether regulators and senior management combine to send a clear and consistent message to traders – or whether the logic of the financial marketplace leads some firms to continue send conflicting or ambivalent messages to them – misconduct is likely to continue to be a tough nut to crack.

Economic Ideas and the Political Construction of the Financial Crash of 2008

This article is a short introduction to a special section on economic ideas and the political construction of the financial crash. It begins by explaining why economic ideas and the politics of appeals to certain ideas are so integral to the historical significance of the crash of 2008 and the question of whether it can be considered a crash at all. The first section covers the literature on ideas and economic crisis. The second section highlights that the contribution of the special section is to engage in a stock taking exercise of the empirical and conceptual patterns concerning the politics of ideational change underway in the areas of: comparative fiscal policy; monetary policy and Euro zone debt management; capital controls; and financial and securities market regulation and standard setting. The final section outlines the structure of this special section and content of the individual articles.

Organisational controls, typologies and time scales of paraglacial gravel-dominated coastal systems

The fundamental controls on the initiation and development of gravel-dominated deposits (beaches and barriers) on paraglacial coasts are particle size and shape, sediment supply, storm wave activity (primarily runup), relative sea-level (RSL) change, and terrestrial basement structure (primarily as it affects accommodation space). This paper examines the stochastic basis for barrier organisation as shown by variation in gravel barrier architecture. We recognise punctuated self-organisation of barrier development that is disrupted by short phases of barrier instability. The latter results from positive feedback causing barrier breakdown when sediment supply is exhausted. We examine published typologies for gravel barriers and advocate a consolidated perspective using rate of RSL change and sediment supply. We also consider the temporal variation in controls on barrier development. These are examined in terms of a simple behavioural model (BARCH) for prograding gravel barrier architecture and its sensitivity to such controls. The nature of macroscale (102–103 years) gravel barrier development, including inherited characteristics that influence barrier genesis, as well as forcing from changing RSL, sediment supply, headland control and barrier inertia, is examined in the context of long-surviving barriers along the southern England coastline.

The Financial Accountability of Irish Credit Unions: an initial empirical study

Credit unions are member-owned, voluntary, self-help, democratic, not-for-profit institutions that provide financial services to their members. They have both economic and social goals. Over this last decade they have achieved remarkable growth levels and currently there are 600 such organisations in Ireland, with approximately 50 per cent of the adult population of Ireland belonging to a credit union. Accounting for credit unions is a much-neglected area and relatively little is known about the sector's accountability. This paper presents the results of an initial empirical study of the financial accountability of Irish credit unions. A series of interviews and a basic content analysis of 178 recent financial statements were used to identify the views of key stakeholders with respect to the discharge of financial accountability by credit unions and the current quality of financial reporting. Overall, the research points to a sector where financial accountability through the medium of the annual report is weak and possible adverse consequences of this are explored. On the basis of the interviews it is suggested that if changes in financial accountability are to be achieved then some more proactive engagement of parties external to the management of individual credit unions is needed.