Finance

Goldman Sachs Ethics: An Easy Call

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Sometimes the biggest ethics stories are the easiest. I haven’t written much about Enron, for example. When a company uses deceptive, shell corporations to hide its liabilities so profit reports look artificially rosy and investors keep buying company stock, it is obviously unethical. Even the ethics-challenged management of Enron could figure that out. The Goldman Sachs scandal, once one clears away the static and spin, is almost as straight-forward.

Are the Democrats seizing upon Goldman Sachs as a scapegoat for the financial meltdown they, like the Republicans, were complicit in as well? Obviously. That doesn’t mean that the firm doesn’t deserve all the abuse that is being heaped on it. Did the S.E.C., supposedly an apolitical and independent agency, time the announcement of its suit against Goldman Sachs to help rally public opinion behind the Obama Administration’s proposed Wall Street reforms? It wouldn’t surprise me. We have seen previous Justice Departments, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other supposedly “non-political” entities act blatantly partisan over and over again. The S.E.C. trying to give Obama’s reforms a boost would be one of the least dastardly of these breaches, especially since the public should be informed about the kind of conduct the culture of Wall Street permits. G.O.P. complaints about the timing of the announcement are, to say the least, strange. Would it be better to hide this story from the public? What matters is whether the S.E.C. has a legitimate case. It is clear that it has. It may not turn out to be a winning case, but it is legitimate. [Note: Personally, I think it is  more likely that the S.E.C. announced the law suit to counter the embarrassing revelation that so many of its regulators spent endless hours on the job surfing and downloading pornography off the internet.]

The legal issues will probably be settled in court; the topic now is ethics. After watching the testimony of various Goldman Sachs officials before the Senate, I find it hard to see a credible argument that what the firm did—selling what its own employees referred to as “crappy” investment products to firm clients, and then betting its own funds that those products would end up losers—could be called anything but unethical. Continue reading →

When Blind Justice Blinds Love: the Saga of the Gambling Grannies

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I’m sure you, like me, are eagerly anticipating the resolution of the case in New Britain Connecticut, in which one elderly sister is suing the other for a share of a 2005 Powerball jackpot of a half million dollars. The result, however, will be determined by technical legal issues, such as whether thee was there a valid contract between the sisters to split all gambling winnings, as the suing sis insists. There has already been one interesting wrinkle: gambling contracts are typically unenforceable, and so was this one until it applied to Powerball, which is state lottery and therefore, unlike other gambling in Connecticut, legal…just one more little bonus from of state governments taking over the numbers racket.

Yet the more important question, for those of us other than the sisters, Rose Bakaysa and her younger sister Theresa Sokaitis, is why some application of ethical values didn’t stop the lawsuit from getting to court. The situation is this: Rose and Theresa were always close,  and in their retirement, the two began gambling regularly, taking trips to casinos and playing the lottery. They made a deal, years ago (Rose is 87 and Theresa is 84) that if either of them won anything, they would split it 50-50.

In 2004, right before Rose hit the jackpot, the sisters had an argument over–what else?—some money, and stopped speaking to each other. Rose tore up the notorized contract, but Theresa kept it safe, just in case. This is why they are in court. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Unethical Ethics Teachers

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

An essay by lawyers Joel Cohen and Katherine A. Helm begins with this story:

“Noted ethics philosopher and Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell once was questioned by the Harvard Board of Governors about having an extramarital affair with a student. When faced with the hypocrisy of being an ethics professor engaged in immoral conduct, Russell argued his private affairs had nothing to do with his professional duties. “But you are a Professor of Ethics!” maintained one of the board members. “I was [also] a Professor of Geometry at Cambridge,” Russell rejoined, but “they never asked me why I was not a triangle.”‘

The authors use the anecdote to explore the issue of whether proven ethics miscreants like Eliot Spitzer, Rod Blagojevich and disbarred class action lawyer William Lerach ought to be lecturing, speaking, or otherwise being listened to in regard to their opinions and advice on ethics. After all, acting teachers are often indifferent actors, and the best baseball managers weren’t much as players. Why should ethics be any different?  Continue reading →

Hypocrisy Prize

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I am usually reluctant to accuse anyone of hypocrisy, and similarly suspicious of those who do. True hypocrisy is relatively rare. A person who condemns bad conduct that he or she has engaged in at another time is not necessarily a hypocrite, for example, and the past conduct does not diminish the legitimacy of the condemnation. Hypocrisy is a form of dishonesty that implicates one’s integrity, as it involves taking a position of convenience that isn’t sincerely held, or holding others to standards that one still refuses to apply to oneself.

If there is an outrageous hypocrisy line, however, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman crossed it today with his op-ed belittling Sen. Jim Bunning and Republicans who opposed extending unemployment benefits. He wrote, in a piece entitled “Sen. Bunning’s Universe”: Continue reading →

Essay: Ending the Bi-Partisan Effort to Destroy Trust in America

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Both the Pentagon shooter and the Texas I.R.S. attacker were motivated by a virulent distrust of the U.S. government, the distrust mutating into desperation and violence with the assistance of personal problems and emotional instability. We would be foolish, however, to dismiss the two as mere “wingnuts,” the current term of choice to describe political extremists who have gone around the bend. They are a vivid warning of America’s future, for the media, partisan commentators, the two political parties and our elected officials are doing their worst to convert all of us into wingnuts, and the results could be even more disastrous than the fanciful horrors the Left and the Right tell us that the other has planned for us. Continue reading →

Nancy Pelosi and Forced Virtue

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’m sure my friend and colleague Bob Stone will forgive my picking on a casual phrase he used in a comment on the previous post, for it is the inspiration for this one, and it involves the important issue of forced virtue.

Bob alluded to Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally doing “the right thing” when, as reported in the morning media, she told House Ways and Means Committee Chair Charles Rangel that he had to resign his post because of multiple ethics violations. Pelosi, we now know, had avoided this for as long as possible, first ignoring Rangel’s actions, then making the dodge that the Ethics Committee first had to make its ruling (Rangel’s egregious violations have never been in doubt), then suggesting that the violations were not significant (knowing that among them was a failure to pay taxes on $75,000 of income as well as acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars of unreported—that is, hidden—income, all on the part of the reigning chair of the committee that oversees tax legislation) because the country wasn’t “jeopardized” by them. But now the press is calling for Rangel’s head, the Republicans are making accusations that seem, for once, reasonable, and other Democratic House members have joined the chorus demanding that Charlie must go. And this is all occurring as Pelosi is trying to martial her House majority as she attempts to ram the latest health care reform package past the nation’s gag reflex.

In short, Pelosi isn’t really doing the right thing. She’s doing the only thing. Continue reading →

Futile Ethics Lessons From the Luge

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Long before Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili of the Republic of Georgia crashed and died on a training run there, Vancouver’s Whistler Sliding Centre, now the site of the Olympics luge, bobsled and skeleton competitions, had been the target of complaints, warnings and controversy regarding its safety. After the first international training event at Whistler in November 2008, the president of the luge governing body openly expressed worries over the speed of the track. Since then, there have been sufficient accidents on the track, not only in the luge, but also bobsled and skeleton races, that the fatal accident there could not fairly be called “a surprise.”  Just a  day before the Georgian was killed, United States luger Mark Grimmette was quoted as being concerned about the course’s speed, saying, “I think we’re probably getting close, too close, to the edge.” Later the same day, a Romanian luge racer was knocked unconscious during his training run. The frequency of crashes during the training runs last week were far above the norm.

Nevertheless, Olympic and luge officials chose not to make changes to the course that would limit the speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour that luge, bobsled and skeleton competitors were reaching, speeds beyond what they were used to, or had trained to handle.

And yet… Continue reading →

Stats, Polar Bears, and “Truth by Repetition”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

When I did marketing for a company that created annuities for the recipients of large court damages, I was armed with alarming statistics I had gleaned from the annuity industry’s publications.  Half of the recipients of large lump sum settlements or damages from personal injury and medical negligence lawsuits had dissipated all of the funds (usually calculated to last a lifetime) within two years or less. More than 75% had blown through all the cash, often millions of dollars, within five years. These figures were accepted as fact everywhere,  and we used them profitably to persuade plaintiffs, lawyers and courts to approve annuity arrangements that would parcel out the funds over the years, keeping the money safe from needy relatives and spending sprees. Then, one day, I decided to track down the studies that were the sources of the statistics I was using.

There weren’t any. I discovered a circular trail, with various sources quoting each other. Continue reading →

NPR Shows How Bad Opinions Get Made

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist at Duke University who struck gold with his Malcolm Gladwell-esque airplane book, Predictably Irrational. The book discussed his work in human behavior and how apparently irrelevant or minor factors affect our behaviors in significant and surprising  ways. I like the book, and I like Professor Ariely, but I now suspect him of using the American public as his guinea pigs for Best Seller #2,  and of rigging the experiments in the process. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Sally Herigstad

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Sally Herigstad, the MSN website tells us, is a certified public accountant and author of the book,  Help! I Can’t Pay My Bills. She is a personal-finance writer, it says, who has been contributing to Microsoft and MSN Money since 1998.

And, based on her article, “6 Reasons Not to Save for Kids’ College,” she is also a fully-qualified Ethics Dunce.

It is fine to explain the various inefficiencies of putting aside funds for your children’s education, but Herigstad’s argument boils down to selfishness, and thus serves as an incentive for parents to abdicate the ethical duties of parenthood because an expert has decreed that it’s the reasonable thing to do. Continue reading →