One result of the credit crunch, as Gillian Tett has recently written in the FT Weekend, has been a “celebrity” focus on the crisis and the ethical shortcomings. Gillian Tett, one of the first to publically start questioning derivative trading, also appears in Inside Job, an award-winning documentary narrated by Hollywood royalty Matt “Bourne Identity” Damon, bringing the workings of the way that power and finance work (and ultimately didn’t work!) to the world’s attention.

Although now assistant editor of the FT, Tett started life as an anthropologist, qualifying her to comment on the “social silence” regarding what went on leading up to the crash. So what are the costs of silence? Integrity was hard to find – on a silver screen near you in Wall Street, Money never sleeps, the recently released Gordon Gekko, states “someone reminded me I once said greed is good; now it seems it's legal”.

Greed and unethical behavior comes with a high price – and whether played out in Wall Street, or at a company or government level anywhere in the world, the results can cost lives. As Andrew Newton, a lawyer and former bank compliance officer,outlined in a recent blog some of the severe global repercussions of Wall Street's crisis include:

• 64 million people will have been shunted into extreme poverty (i.e. living on less than1.25 per day) by the end of 2010;
• 82 million people are going hungry who would not otherwise have done so;
• 1.2 million babies and children under five are forecast to die by the end of 2015 who would not have died but for the crisis

CIMA has been making its own “ethics movies” and other support for the revised Code of Ethics and one of our stars, CIMA student blogger Oliver Gearing has also been blogging on the issue on why an ethical code is so important.

How does the code support your day to day work? And how best can CIMA support members around the world in influencing others to act ethically?

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See CIMA's revised code: www.cimaglobal.com/ethics