Equality and Responsibility in Financial Crisis: an ethical approach to the regulation of bail-outs, moral hazards and accountability

Ramiro Peres

No 520, Working Papers Series from Central Bank of Brazil, Research Department

Abstract: After the 2008 crisis, there were several debates on the bail-out and the lack of accountability of financial institutions; this supposedly affects political values such as equality and responsibility: it implies transferring resources from the public (for instance, poor people) to specific economic agents who have chosen to incur certain risks. On the other hand, it is arguable that it would not be up to the regulators to protect investors’ interests, and that there would be more efficient and less burdensome instruments associated with prudential regulation. Our goal is to provide a justification for the bail-out and for holding bankers accountable. In section 2, we present a brief description of the problem in the context of the crisis, followed by a justification for the bail-out through the incentives argument, based on Rawls’s difference principle. In section 3, we provide an ethical discussion over the corresponding moral hazards, and investigate how to mitigate it through coercive measures.

Date: 2020-03
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