The 2008 Wall Street crisis caused the world to experience the most devastating economic disaster since the 1930 Great Depression.  A significant cause of this crisis was due to defective mortgages (i.e. mortgages that did not contain all of the required documents) which created the housing bubble of 2006.  With little or no regard for the welfare of the general public, the companies writing high-risk mortgage loans eventually left people homeless and themselves penniless.

I believe that the basis of business ethics is the feeling of sympathy.  Only when people can feel sympathy for each other do the standards of ethics begin to take affect.  As Adam Smith said in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, humans have an inherent tendency to sympathize with others.  However, this is usually when the two subjects are closely related to each other or are directly observing the each others’ situation.  In the case of the 2008 economics crisis, a group of highly intelligent people manipulated the system unethically in order to maximize their profits, because their sense of sympathy during the process was reduced due to the complexity of the process itself.

Informative Video on the Wall Street Crisis: 29 Oct 2008 Wall Street Expects Collapse

Works Cited:

“Wall Street: Wall Street’s crisis.” The Economist – World News, Politics, Economics, Business & Finance. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Nov. 2012. <http://www.economist.com/node/1088