Seung Ha Lee

Professor Whittet
ENGW 3304
10 February 2017
Ethics in Finance:
An Annotated Bibliography
Boatright, John. Ethics in Finance. John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Print.
John discusses the overview of the need for ethics in finance and various aspects of ethics
applied in finance. In the Ethics and law page, he raises the question of why regulation is not an
effective way of applying ethics in finance. He believes that it is not easy to formulate a rule of
certain transactions and precise rules can be gamed to produce results that may be considered
unfair. He believes that self-regulations is a more effective means for securing ethical conduct
because it is hard to draw the line of what is considered an abusive transaction.

Lenssen, Paige. The Ethics and Legality of Financial Regulation: What Enron Revealed. 2015.
Web. 10 Feb. 2017. http://xchanges.org/issue10.1/Lenssen/Lenssen1.html
The Enron scandal is one of the most publicized controversy related to unethical conduct.
This case started a major reform in financial regulation with the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act. The fall of Enron sparked a discussion of ethical concerns in the finance industry and how
finance should approach these unethical situations. Although it is clear that Enron committed
fraud, the legality of its action still remains a question.
Huneke, Samuel. The Accumulation of Greek Debt. Web. 10 Feb. 2017.
http://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/case-studies/1492-2
The Greek government and Goldman Sachs made a deal that allowed Greece to legally
underestimate its reported debt and deficit figures. The question of whether the Greek
government acted ethically is difficult to judge because one can argue that Greek was acting in
the best interests of its citizens. The means Greece used to perform that transaction was legal,
that does not imply that it was moral. In Goldman Sachs perspective, one can argue that it acted
entirely ethical is making that transaction because it met the clients requirements. Ethics here is
argued differently for both sides in the same situation.

Angeloni, Ignazio. Ethics in finance: a banking supervisory perspective. 2014. Web. 10 Feb.
2017.
https://www.bankingsupervision.europa.eu/press/speeches/date/2014/html/se140926.en.html
Ignazio Angeloni is a member of the supervisory board of the ECB and his main argument is that
better rules are necessary but not sufficient enough to restore trust. He believes that trust requires
not only compliance but also ethics. To put ethics into practice, he believes that board members
and senior level management are important people to keep these ethics in check. Although, it is
hard to implement this behavior because the government has already attempted to make ethical
practices more systematic.

Darus, Faizah. Mad, Salina. Nejati, Mehran. Ethical and Social Responsibility of Financial
Institutions: Influence of Internal and External Pressure. 2015. Print.
These researchers studied the influence of internal and external drivers of corporate social
responsibilities in the context of reporting financial resources, the international exposure of top
management, and the ownership structure of the financial institutions in Malaysia. It provides
statistical figures regarding those categories and the study shows that financial institutions are
expected to enforce sustainable business practices. External pressures from the government was
not significant in the quality of being socially responsible.