Download or read book Ethics Bankruptcy and Greed written by Harlan D. Platt and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This article is about ethics, or more correctly questionable ethics. It is also about greed. When a commercial party's consideration for its stakeholders is distorted by an opportunity for short-term gain, it creates a self-centric view of the world. This myopia creates a blurred vision of others - their needs and roles - and consequently may cause parties to make decisions that ultimately prove to be disastrous not just to those immediately affected by the decision, but to the industry as well. This paper concerns certain provisions of the 2005 revisions to the United States Bankruptcy Code referred to as The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA). Specifically, this paper considers how commercial property landlords used BAPCPA to obtain certain changes to the Bankruptcy Code that under a given set of (historically prevailing) circumstances would have had the effect of transferring value from other creditors to the landlords, but under other (now prevailing) circumstances actually have had disastrous consequences - for the landlords, and for other parties. We submit that the failures to consider how these changes would affect other parties, and the apparent failure to recognize that historical circumstances could change, represent an ethical failure by commercial landlords.

Download or read book Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis written by Boudewijn de Bruin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the decision-making of key stakeholders in the financial services industry through the lens of recent work on epistemic virtues.

Download or read book Anatomy of Greed written by Brian Cruver and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young, brash, sporting a shiny new MBA, and obscenely overpaid, Brian Cruver epitomized the Enron employee when he first entered the company's Houston office; and from day one he found himself a cog in the wheel of a venal greed machine. For the next nine months, he would witness firsthand the now-infamous corporate tragedy that he relates in these ruthlessly honest, often hilarious, and frequently disturbing pages. Here are the accounting tricks, insider stock trades, grossly lucrative fraudulent partnerships, and death dance to bankruptcy. Equally revealing, though, are Cruver's descriptions of everyday life at Enron: the cocky wheeling and dealing, intraoffice relationships, casual conversations at the shredder, and the insidious group-think that committed Enronians to the propaganda of flawed executives like Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andy Fastow. Out of their wreckage, Cruver has fashioned an arresting and cautionary morality tale for our time. Anatomy of Greed was the basis for the CBS-TV movie The Crooked E: a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the last days in the strange life of one of the world's richest, riskiest, and most corrupt corporations. Eight pages of telling photographs are included.

Download or read book The Caesars Palace Coup written by Sujeet Indap and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was the most brutal corporate restructuring in Wall Street history. The 2015 bankruptcy brawl for the storied casino giant, Caesars Entertainment, pitted brilliant and ruthless private equity legends against the world's most relentless hedge fund wizards. In the tradition of Barbarians at the Gate and The Big Short comes the riveting, multi-dimensional poker game between private equity firms and distressed debt hedge funds that played out from the Vegas Strip to Manhattan boardrooms to Chicago courthouses and even, for a moment, the halls of the United States Congress. On one side: Apollo Global Management and TPG Capital. On the other: the likes of Elliott Management, Oaktree Capital, and Appaloosa Management. The Caesars bankruptcy put a twist on the old-fashioned casino heist. Through a $27 billion leveraged buyout and a dizzying string of financial engineering transactions, Apollo and TPG—in the midst of the post-Great Recession slump—had seemingly snatched every prime asset of the company from creditors, with the notable exception of Caesars Palace. But Caesars’ hedge fund lenders and bondholders had scooped up the company’s paper for nickels and dimes. And with their own armies of lawyers and bankers, they were ready to do everything necessary to take back what they believed was theirs—if they could just stop their own infighting. These modern financiers now dominate the scene in Corporate America as their fight-to-the-death mentality continues to shock workers, politicians, and broader society—and even each other. In The Caesars Palace Coup, financial journalists Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap illuminate the brutal tactics of distressed debt mavens—vultures, as they are condemned—in the sale and purchase of even the biggest companies in the world with billions of dollars hanging in the balance.

Download or read book Legal Ethics Stories written by Deborah L. Rhode and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collection of ten significant ethics rulings reveal the rich background surrounding salient cases on issues of race, gender, class, taxation, bankruptcy, defense representation, confidentiality, practicing with law partners, and greed. The story behind each case provides a look into its immediate impact as well as its continuing importance in shaping the law. This book serves as a reminder that ultimately law is about human beings, not ?doctrines? or even ?cases,? because the human lives it addresses are real and vivid. The stories typify issues that most lawyers confront in one form or other at some time in their careers. In a striking way, the stories bring a human dimension to the pressures lawyers face, the ethical decisions they confront, the institutions they work in, and the daily choices they make.

Download or read book Fool s Gold written by Gillian Tett and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her news-breaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool’s Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown. Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the “Morgan Mafia,” as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team’s bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control. The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the “shadow banking” world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk. But when the Morgan team’s derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted—through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed—by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch—even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling—catastrophe followed. Tett’s access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank’s escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown. A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool’s Gold is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.

Download or read book Reckless Endangerment written by Gretchen Morgenson and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year In Reckless Endangerment, Gretchen Morgenson exposes how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect the country from financial harm were actually complicit in the actions that finally blew up the American economy. Drawing on previously untapped sources and building on original research from coauthor Joshua Rosner—who himself raised early warnings with the public and investors, and kept detailed records—Morgenson connects the dots that led to this fiasco. Morgenson and Rosner draw back the curtain on Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance giant that grew, with the support of the Clinton administration, through the 1990s, becoming a major opponent of government oversight even as it was benefiting from public subsidies. They expose the role played not only by Fannie Mae executives but also by enablers at Countrywide Financial, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, HUD, Congress, and the biggest players on Wall Street, to show how greed, aggression, and fear led countless officials to ignore warning signs of an imminent disaster. Character-rich and definitive in its analysis, and with a new afterword that brings the story up to date, this is the one account of the financial crisis you must read.

Download or read book Burning Down the House written by Andrew Koppelman and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively history of American libertarianism and its decay into dangerous fantasy. In 2010 in South Fulton, Tennessee, each household paid the local fire department a yearly fee of $75.00. That year, Gene Cranick's house accidentally caught fire. But the fire department refused to come because Cranick had forgotten to pay his yearly fee, leaving his home in ashes. Observers across the political spectrum agreed—some with horror and some with enthusiasm—that this revealed the true face of libertarianism. But libertarianism did not always require callous indifference to the misfortunes of others. Modern libertarianism began with Friedrich Hayek’s admirable corrective to the Depression-era vogue for central economic planning. It resisted oppressive state power. It showed how capitalism could improve life for everyone. Yet today, it's a toxic blend of anarchism, disdain for the weak, and rationalization for environmental catastrophe. Libertarians today accept new, radical arguments—which crumble under scrutiny—that justify dishonest business practices and Covid deniers who refuse to wear masks in the name of “freedom.” Andrew Koppelman’s book traces libertarianism's evolution from Hayek’s moderate pro-market ideas to the romantic fabulism of Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand, and Charles Koch’s promotion of climate change denial. Burning Down the House is the definitive history of an ideological movement that has reshaped American politics.

Download or read book Pipe Dreams written by Robert Bryce and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2004-01-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the shocking collapse of Enron in fall, 2001 came an equally shocking series of disclosures about how America's seventh-largest company had destroyed itself. There were unethical deals, offshore accounts, and accounting irregularities. There were Wall Street analysts who seemed to have been asleep on the job. There were the lies top executives told so that they could line their own pockets while workers and shareholders lost billions. But after all these disclosures, the question remains: Why? Why did a thriving, innovative company with rock-solid cash flow and reliable earnings suddenly flame out in a maelstrom of corruption, fraud and skulduggery? The answer, Texas business journalist Robert Bryce reveals in this incisive and entertaining book, is that bad business practices begin with human beings. Pipe Dreams traces Enron's astounding transformation from a small regional gas pipeline company into an energy Goliath...and then tracks step-by-step, business decision by business decision, extra-marital affair by extra-marital affair, how, when and why the culture of Enron began to go rotten, and who was responsible. The story of Enron's fall isn't just a story about accounting procedures; it's a story about people. Bryce tells that story with all the personality, passion, humor, and inside dope you'd hope for, and the result is an un-putdownable read in the tradition of Barbarians at the Gate and The Predators' Ball.

Download or read book Unsettled written by Ryan Hampton and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shocking inside account of reckless capitalism and injustice in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case. In September 2019, Purdue Pharma—the maker of OxyContin and a company controlled by the infamous billionaire Sackler family—filed for bankruptcy to protect itself from 2,600 lawsuits for its role in fueling the U.S. overdose crisis. Author and activist Ryan Hampton served as co-chair of the official creditors committee that acted as a watchdog during the process, one of only four victims appointed among representatives of big insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmacies. He entered the case believing that exposing the Sacklers and mobilizing against Purdue would be enough to right the scales of justice. But he soon learned that behind closed doors, justice had plenty of other competition—and it came with a hefty price tag. Unsettled is the inside story of Purdue’s excruciating Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, the company’s eventual restructuring, and the Sackler family’s evasion of any true accountability. It’s also the untold story of how a group of determined ordinary people tried to see justice done against the odds—and in the face of brutal opposition from powerful institutions and even government representatives. Although America was envisioned as an equitable place, where the vulnerable are protected from the greed of the powerful, the corporate-bankruptcy process betrays those values. In its heart of hearts, this system is built to shield the ultra-wealthy, exploit loopholes for political power, promote gross wealth inequality, and allow companies such as Purdue Pharma to run amok. The real story of the Purdue bankruptcy wasn’t that the billion-dollar corporation was a villain, a serial federal offender. No matter what the media said, Purdue didn’t do this alone. They were aided and abetted by the very systems and institutions that were supposed to protect Americans. Even on-your-side elected officials worked against Purdue’s victims—maintaining the status quo at all costs. Americans deserve to know exactly who is responsible for failing to protect people over profits—and what a human life is worth to corporations, billionaires, and lawmakers. Unsettled is what happened behind closed doors—the story of a sick, broken system that destroyed millions of lives and let the Sacklers off almost scot-free.

Download or read book White Coat Black Hat written by Carl Elliott and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By New Yorker and Atlantic writer Carl Elliott, a readable and even funny account of the serious business of medicine. A tongue-in-cheek account of the changes that have transformed medicine into big business. Physician and medical ethicist Carl Elliott tracks the new world of commercialized medicine from start to finish, introducing the professional guinea pigs, ghostwriters, thought leaders, drug reps, public relations pros, and even medical ethicists who use medicine for (sometimes huge) financial gain. Along the way, he uncovers the cost to patients lost in a health-care universe centered around consumerism.

Download or read book Ethics for A Level written by Mark Dimmock and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does pleasure have to do with morality? What role, if any, should intuition have in the formation of moral theory? If something is ‘simulated’, can it be immoral? This accessible and wide-ranging textbook explores these questions and many more. Key ideas in the fields of normative ethics, metaethics and applied ethics are explained rigorously and systematically, with a vivid writing style that enlivens the topics with energy and wit. Individual theories are discussed in detail in the first part of the book, before these positions are applied to a wide range of contemporary situations including business ethics, sexual ethics, and the acceptability of eating animals. A wealth of real-life examples, set out with depth and care, illuminate the complexities of different ethical approaches while conveying their modern-day relevance. This concise and highly engaging resource is tailored to the Ethics components of AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies, with a clear and practical layout that includes end-of-chapter summaries, key terms, and common mistakes to avoid. It should also be of practical use for those teaching Philosophy as part of the International Baccalaureate. Ethics for A-Level is of particular value to students and teachers, but Fisher and Dimmock’s precise and scholarly approach will appeal to anyone seeking a rigorous and lively introduction to the challenging subject of ethics. Tailored to the Ethics components of AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies.

Download or read book Hidden Financial Risk written by J. Edward Ketz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2003-08-08 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider's guide to understanding and eliminating accounting fraud How do these high-profile accounting scandals occur and what could have been done to prevent them. Hidden Financial Risk fills that void by examining methods for off balance sheet accounting, with a particular emphasis on special purpose entities (SPE), the accounting ruse of choice at Enron and other beleaguered companies. J. Edward Ketz identifies the incentives for managers to deceive investors and creditors about financial risk and also shows investors how to protect their investments in a world filled with accounting and auditing frauds. J. Edward Ketz, PhD (State College, PA) is MBA Faculty Director and Associate Professor of Accounting at Penn State's Smeal College of Business. He has been cited in the press nearly 300 times since Enron's bankruptcy, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.. He has a regular column in Accounting Today.

Download or read book Business Ethics written by Archie B. Carroll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These readings grew out of the author's monthly column on business ethics in the business section of the Athens Banner-Herald newspaper. Written in an open and engaging style, the book features topics that are timely, each followed by several thought provoking discussion questions. The book includes readings on the current financial crisis in order to challenge today's students to confront the economic reality in which they will have to live. An excellent addition to any Business Ethics course.

Download or read book What Went Wrong at Enron written by Peter C. Fusaro and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2002-10-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An easy answer guide to the difficult questions surrounding Enron What Went Wrong at Enron explains the critical steps, transactions, and events that led to the demise of a company that was once considered one of the most innovative corporations in the United States. Energy risk management expert Peter Fusaro gets inside Enron and provides a coherent account of the who, why, where, and when of this corporate debacle, without sacrificing the complexity of what has happened. Enron has been front-page news for months, but confusion still remains about what actually happened. What Went Wrong at Enron is written for readers who find themselves wondering what exactly is an energy trading company, what was the sequence of events that caused the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history, and what does this all mean for me.

Download or read book Case Studies in Organizational Communication Ethical Perspectives and Practices written by Steve May and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-01-20 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition integrates ethical theory and practice to help strengthen readers' awareness, judgment, and action in organizations by exploring ethical dilemmas in a diverse range of well-known business cases. This volume explores a range of complex issues in today's organizations, addresses ethical concerns, and investigates the fundamentals that enable organizations to be simultaneously productive and ethical. Compiled with a variety of important examples of organizational communication ethics of today, case studies include the discussion of ethical dilemmas faced by Walmart, Toyota, Enron, Mitsubishi, BP, Arthur Andersen, Google, college athletics, and the pharmaceutical industry, among others. Through these case studies, students are able to directly assess ethical and unethical decision making in a rich, diverse, and complex manner that moves beyond simple explanations of ethics. This book is an invaluable resource for students and those interested in organizational communication ethics.

Download or read book Ethics in Social Networking and Business 2 written by Pierre Massotte and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the second of two volumes dedicated to ethics in social networking and business, presents the future and changing paradigms related to ethics, and morality in our interconnected society. This volume analyzes advanced topics, including new technologies, transhumanism and uberization, to provide a more complex, shared and collective environment into why business ethics is essential for managing risks and uncertainties. The Ethics in Social Networking and Business series is the result of a cross-integration of real experiences (from IBM, society and the Rotary Club), transdisciplinary works in decision making, and advances at the boundaries of several scientific fields.