Ethical decisions will be important to a financial manager as he or she should aim at doing the right thing rather than making profits. Integrity can only be acquired. Nonetheless, it is the key to success in business despite the fact that many people continue with non-ethical business practices oblivious of the consequences.
Everybody must take up his role in ensuring there are high standards of ethics. This is certainly because the duty of maintaining a high level of ethics cannot be transferred to anyone else. Ethics and economics remain intertwined and inevitably related. This may not necessarily be the case with the modern analysts who observe low levels of ethical behavior. But it is still their obligation to have high standards of ethical values.
Financial analysts are the backbone of companies and hence any unethical behavior which occasions conspiracies to fraud or any type of undisclosed transactions will lead to serious financial crises. Unethical behaviors escalate with time and end up causing losses to the company and to its investors. Overvaluation of stock is one of the major unethical issues with managers.
There are some reasons why managers in the firm should ensure they maintain ethics in their undertakings. These include the following: First it is for sustainability reasons. Unethical behaviors will not be a good foundation for enterprises pursuing sustainability. This is because they will mostly be based on frauds and cover ups which can easily be identified and lead to collapse in the future. Secondly, for purposes of building trust, trust which will reward the company in future as there will be more clients pleased with the services. Ethical behavior aims at excellence and hence it will encourage group work and people work as a team so as to ensure they maintain the welfare of an organization. Ethical practices make sure that it is more than just abiding by the laws. Rules and regulations are put forward so that they can be enforced; it is a different case when dealing with ethics. This is because there will be an internal drive to give high quality services. Ethics creates a larger value to the reputation rather than just focusing on the material benefit of doing business.
One of the major challenges is to determine what is ethical and what is unethical and it is for this reason that it is agreed that the right and the wrong is determined purely by duty and intentions. All ethical actions demonstrate an element of dignity to those involved and hence no guilt will be felt after the action as any rational human being would have acted in the same way. As a leader of the firm, there are several steps which one can take to promote ethical behavior in the firm which include the following: Adopt a code of ethics which every employee will pledge to follow; this will differentiate between the organization and individual upon departure from the code of ethics. Discuss about ethics with the employees. This can either be through formal or informal meetings where employees are free to air their views on the same. The employer should reflect on the dilemmas and put himself or herself in a position of the employee, this will help him or her understand the employee better
Issue of Rigging Market
The issue of rigging market is one of the acts that display the highest level of poor business ethics. This is because employees from different banks collude for their own interest to control the world exchange rate. Issues of individuals working for self-interest are brought out in this case bringing out the clear selfishness of the employees to protect their own interests in the organization and in the trade market in general.
One of the latest cases is the issue of currency rigging is where the Bank of England fired about two dozen of staff. It was alleged that the bank decided to sell a lot of Canadian dollars to a corporate customer and as a result depressed the currency price at the fix and so bought them at a lower price. They had shared trading positions with other banks ahead of the fix. There has been also an issue that employees of different institutions dealing with forex trade front run their client orders and rig the trade rates by pushing through trades before and during the 60-seconds window when the benchmarks and the trade rates are determined. This helps them gang millions of money per day as they seek to manipulate the trade market.
