ABSTRACT
Financial institutions and markets render vital services to the economy: they provide funds for consumption and investment, they facilitate access to payment systems, offer custom-designed risk-return combinations for asset management, and manifest an outstanding capacity for innovation in products and services, among many other virtues. Finance is concerned with money, credit, assets, debt, risk, banks, investment, and a variety of investment funds, but it goes further than that: “financing an activity really is creating the architecture for reaching our goals, and providing stewardship afterwards to protect and conserve the achievement of that goal” (Shiller 2012: 6). So finance has a social and moral significance. But it also has its dark side: it is often accused of being cold and even heartless, its managers sometimes prove willing to shade the truth and take whatever advantage lies open to them, and the apparent concentration of power in major financial institutions may work to the detriment of those without enough power or wealth.
