The current financial crisis stems not just from a problem of banking itself. It is a problem of the wider corporate world. The banking failures seem curiously similar to these huge corporate collapses where the financial instruments and special entities set up for particular purposes were so opaque that no one could figure them out.

The Enron disaster and the banking crisis exposed the corruption of corporate culture more generally which has the tendency, given its abstractions, to lose touch with its reality. That reality is ultimately people living their lives. To the corporate entity people too easily come to be little more than numbers on a page. Enron managed to see the lights go out several times in California only in order to up its share value. Its executives appeared to have no concern for anything outside their own interests.

I believe organisations should be small, no more than a few dozen people where each is known to the other and genuine relationships flourish both within the organisation as well as with customers and the broader community. Developing systems that need absurd levels of abstraction that no one comprehends is asking for trouble. Financial innovations may be necessary and welcome but they have to be appropriate and ultimately benevolent. They have to service the needs of all humanity and not run counter to utility. The problem of corporate culture is its tendency toward systems that don't account for human complexity. Totalitarian states were criticised for not respecting the individual. Corporate capitalism does likewise with its abstractions and its greed and its remoteness from the individual short of the star players who run the show. It has shown abject disregard for human beings beyond its own sphere of reference.

The high rollers in the Enron debacle paid the price through criminal conviction. Contrast this with the bankers, who although they have been guilty of similar misdemeanours, have been largely unaccountable and hardly even apologetic. The situation for them is stark in its converse. This is an inconsistency worth pointing out. The real devil here is in the detail. And the detail is the product of the corporate players. The bankers danced to their tune and messed up badly. The real price paid is a world economy now being pulled apart.