The SEC finalized settlements December-11 with Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. and UBS Securities LLC and UBS Financial Services, Inc. that will provide nearly $30 billion to customers who invested in auction rate securities before the market for those securities froze in February.

Resisting Corporate Corruption The frequently used textbook is now in its 4th edition and includes new case studies on Tesla, VW, Nikola, WeWork, and Theranos. Resisting Corporate Corruption teaches business ethics in a manner very different from the philosophical and legal frameworks that dominate graduate schools. The book offers twenty-seven case studies and eight essays that cover a full range of business practices, controls, and ethics issues. The essays discuss the nature of sound financial controls, root causes of the Financial Crisis, contemporary ethics challenges like ‘Fake it Till You Make It,’ and the evolving nature of whistleblower protections. The cases are framed to instruct students in early identification of ethics problems and how to work such issues within corporate organizations. They also provide would-be whistleblowers with instruction on the challenges they’d face, plus information on the legal protections, and outside supports available should they embark on that course. Some of the cases illustrate how ‘The Young are the Most Vulnerable,’ i.e. short-service employees are most at risk of being sacrificed by an unethical firm. Other cases show the ethical dilemmas facing well-known CEOs and the alternatives they can employ to better combine ethical conduct and sound business strategy. Through these case studies, students should emerge with a practical toolkit that will help them to follow their moral compass. Finally, the cases provide an in-depth look at how a corporation becomes progressively corrupted (Enron), how the Financial Crisis was rooted in ethical decay at institutions as diverse as Countrywide, Goldman Sacks, Citigroup, and Moody’s, and at the ethical challenges that have emerged in the post-crisis, post-Dodd-Frank environment at firms like TESLA, VW, Theranos and WeWork. Audience This text provides practical case study work for business and law students, and employees in the formative stages of their careers. It is intended to help prepare this audience to withstand pressures and adverse cultural influences as they progress along a career path.

Taking financial risks is an essential part of what banks do, but there’s no clear sense of what constitutes responsible risk. Taking legal risks seems to have become part of what banks do as well. Since the financial crisis, Congress has passed copious amounts of legislation aimed at curbing banks’ risky behavior. Lawsuits against large banks have cost them billions. Yet bad behavior continues to plague the industry. Why isn’t there more change? In Better Bankers, Better Banks, Claire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter look back at the history of banking and show how the current culture of bad behavior—dramatized by the corrupt, cocaine-snorting bankers of The Wolf of Wall Street—came to be. In the early 1980s, banks went from partnerships whose partners had personal liability to corporations whose managers had no such liability and could take risks with other people’s money. A major reason bankers remain resistant to change, Hill and Painter argue, is that while banks have been faced with large fines, penalties, and legal fees—which have exceeded one hundred billion dollars since the onset of the crisis—the banks (which really means the banks’shareholders) have paid them, not the bankers themselves. The problem also extends well beyond the pursuit of profit to the issue of how success is defined within the banking industry, where highly paid bankers clamor for status and clients may regard as inevitable bankers who prioritize their own self-interest. While many solutions have been proposed, Hill and Painter show that a successful transformation of banker behavior must begin with the bankers themselves. Bankers must be personally liable from their own assets for some portion of the bank’s losses from excessive risk-taking and illegal behavior. This would instill a culture that discourages such behavior and in turn influence the sorts of behavior society celebrates or condemns. Despite many sensible proposals seeking to reign in excessive risk-taking, the continuing trajectory of scandals suggests that we’re far from ready to avert the next crisis. Better Bankers, Better Banks is a refreshing call for bankers to return to the idea that theirs is a noble profession.

The Trouble is the Banks collects 150 letters that Americans (and one Canadian) wrote directly to executives and directors of five big banks in fall 2011, at a time when protests were emerging in Occupy Wall Street camps across the United States. These writers speak as citizens to citizens, making an unprecedented portrait of ordinary Americans' experiences of the financial crisis since 2007. Here is the speech of the People, not any authority above them.