The Global Financial Crisis

This chapter presents some observations of the global financial crisis from Bob's vantage point. By September 2008, Bob had joined a different bank and had become chief executive of one of its U.S. subsidiaries. The author's regular meetings with him from August 2008 until the summer of 2009 thus provided an insider's perspective into the crisis and exposed to a domain that had barely surfaced in this study: morality. The chapter reveals the moral outrage at the crisis experienced by Bob and other Wall Street insiders, as well as Bob's contention that moral judgments can help managers evaluate their subordinates' use of models in situations of uncertainty. Bob attributed the global financial crisis to the organizational changes that had taken place on Wall Street since the 1980s, along with their moral side effects. Wall Street, he remarked a few days after Lehman's bankruptcy, did not die in September 2008, but had already been dead for years.