Ethics in Finance

Two things to consider watching this video.

1) These are traders. Overpayed, with no ethics.
2) Goldman Sachs has a great reputation uh?

Enjoy.....

The magic word is "social collaboration"

I keep on thinking how can we achieve a bigger social impact than today.
Charities and NGOs are working hard but yet...what they're doing is not even enough to keep a billion of people away from suffering from starvation, homelessness, some of the most common deseases which turn out to be fatal for them.
There must be a way to do more.
And the more I think about this issue, the more I'm convinced that to reduce such social plague we must align the institutions with big money to people needs. I mean not NGOs or even States, but companies.

Simply, it's not just enough that each of them contributes to whatever social cause. We must convince them that this is one of those cases when joining forces achieves a much better result than the single individual forces put together.

We must find a way to achieve "social collaboration", to help companies to look at the whole "social space" not as a big competition but as a big collaboration environment, where the big picture will help to get better results.

There are plenty of ways to get to this point and some enlightened companies have already begun. Check here.

But it's also about us. What do we do for this.
In our little living space we have a role in our society, some working in others advising companies. Let's bring this "collaboration movement" into the small, medium or big organisations, let's challenge the status quo, let's make them understand that helping others, committing to this, is not just "good conscience" but also a strategic long term advantage.

With some likely profits in mind, perhaps boards may change their view and reach out their suppliers to start a real  and committed social project.
Am I wrong?

Socially Responsible Investments: is there a market?

I was attending a nice event last week about the ESG market, with well renowned speakers from Goldman Sachs, Unicredit and BoA.
It was very well moderated by Reuters who provided the attendees with a nice piece of research.
Anyway, I found this really interesting study from EUROSIF, which I think it's worth sharing.

"The UK is widely acknowledged as a global leader in sustainable and responsible finance. Its dynamic cluster of sustainable and responsible investment expertise is spread across a range of institutions, including asset managers, investment consultants, investment banks and independent research houses. It was a pioneer in carbon trading and is now a key centre for the carbon markets". (Follows here)