Fixing Finance: Comparative Approaches to Changing Firm Culture

John M. Conley co-presented "Fixing Finance: Comparative Approaches to Changing Firm Culture" at the 2015 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Conference. This event was held July 2-4, 2015 at The London School of Economics and Political Science.  

Ascribing problems within too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks to an excessively risk-preferring and unethical “corporate culture” has become de rigeur in the wake of the financial crisis. This has been particularly true in light of multiple billion-dollar settlements in the United States for problems ranging from manipulation of the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (Libor) benchmark and the foreign exchange market to securities fraud in the sales of mortgage-backed securities, energy markets manipulation, and facilitation of tax fraud, drug dealing and illegal weapons sales. Recognition that TBTF banks need to change some of their fundamental norms and behaviors has been expressed by such persons as Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of the Financial Stability Board; Bill Dudley, President and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank (who organized a day-long conference in October, 2014, on the topic of cultural reform); and Daniel Turillo, a Governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. As stated by Mark Carney, “[f]undamental change is needed to institutional culture, to compensation arrangements, and to markets.”