Is being good the same as being good with money, or rather someone else’s money? The FSA have been keen to publicize the numbers of individuals who have been rejected as worthy of running banks (18 in the last year apparently), what is less clear is how the ethics of an individual will affect the culture of the company which they run?
Certainly, banks are more hierarchical and rule driven than most organizations, however, by making it an issue of ethics rather than management competence or control is a continuation of the theme that banking crisis was not a failure of the system but a failure of morality. I find this analysis somewhat dangerous because it assumes that with the right people the system will work just fine, thank you very much. There is very little evidence that any system, however perfect it may be in theory, has any hope of controlling the practices of money in everyday life.
It paints a picture of the bank executive as a guardian or philosopher king guiding his citizens based on some higher understanding and once more centralizes responsibility rather than placing it in the hands of the individuals who in reality "make money" in every sense.
Can we blame an individual for the sales culture within RBS and HBOS? Was it a failure of individual ethics or merely a mistaken collective belief in certainties and truths which have been found wanting? Alan Greenspan was certainly repentant for his error of faith in markets, but aren’t we just replacing one philosophy (the overly deterministic, positivist materialism of economists) with another (a strange mix of social and technological idealism - which Chris Dillow critiques as ‘managerialism’ in his book "The end of politics").
I would be intrigued to know how these interviews are conducted and more importantly who is the judge of these ethics of bankers. I doubt that the FSA employs someone schooled extensively in Socratic method so I imagine it is something of a Q&A approach with a measure of ‘fitness for banking’ scored out of 20 perhaps? Answers on a postcard. Given the ability of individuals to subvert the fact finds and interviews which regulate our usage of money (essentially a measure of knowing the right answer rather than an enquiry into the truth of things).
Perhaps they can learn from the apocryphal stories about Cambridge interviews and their esoteric lines of questioning, which various Dons are very keen to avow but personal experience suggests have a very small element of truth about them. Personally I wouldn’t be asking them about their ‘ethics’, nor would I be asking them to imagine life as a cow or answer the question – "is this a question?" (answer, "yes, if this is an answer"). What about a short 1000 words on ‘being good with money’ – what it means and how they see their organization’s role in the everyday practice of money? Or my personal favourite, what would be the first thing you would do after winning a personally significant sum on the National Lottery? (best answer to date from the poor guy who thought he had won the Euro millions jackpot - he borrowed £1000 instantly and wanted to move next door to Alan Shearer! - liquid modern ethics writ large!)
