tailieunhanh - The Culture That Gave Rise To The Current Financial Crisis

I recently received a letter from a Vanguard shareholder who described the current global financial crisis as “a crisis of ethic proportions.” Substituting ethic for epic is not only a fine turn of phrase; it accurately places a heavy responsibility for the meltdown on a broad deterioration in traditional ethical standards. In fact, The Wall Street Journal retained that phrase as the title of my op-ed essay that was published just three weeks ago. | The Culture That Gave Rise To The Current Financial Crisis Presented by John C. Bogle, Founder and former Chief Executive The Vanguard Group At the Seventh Annual John M. Templeton, Jr., Lecture on Economic Liberties and the Constitution National Constitution Center Philadelphia, PA May 13, 2009 I recently received a letter from a Vanguard shareholder who described the current global financial crisis as “a crisis of ethic proportions.” Substituting ethic for epic is not only a fine turn of phrase; it accurately places a heavy responsibility for the meltdown on a broad deterioration in traditional ethical standards. In fact, The Wall Street Journal retained that phrase as the title of my op-ed essay that was published just three weeks ago. Relying on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” through which our own self-interest is said to advance the interests of our communities, our society had come to rely less on strict regulation to govern conduct in the field of free enterprise—in commerce, business, and finance—and to rely more on open competition and free markets to create prosperity and well-being, and to add value to our society. But that self-interest got out of hand, and it spread to the very core of our national culture. Simply put, we became what has been called a “bottom line” society, one in which progress and success are largely measured in monetary terms. But our society, I think, is measuring the wrong bottom line: not only money over achievement, but form over substance; prestige over virtue; charisma over character; the ephemeral over the enduring; even mammon over God. Dollars have become the coin of the new realm, and unchecked market forces totally overwhelmed traditional standards of professional conduct, developed over centuries. The views expressed in this speech do not necessarily reflect the views of Vanguard’s present management. 1 The result has been a marked change in our society. The traditional standard of conduct in which “there .