By Maurice Gilbert — CCI Founder and Managing Director of Conselium
(In a special contribution to Corporate Compliance Insights, CCI founder Maurice Gilbert discusses the importance of restoring trust through ethics and compliance for the overall economic recovery plan of the United States.)
How did we get here? Unemployment is mounting, the stock market is on a roller coaster ride, and the banks aren’t lending.
Any number of factors contributed to our economic collapse—credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, Ponzi schemes, subprime mortgages, and all sorts of other things that most of us had never heard of a year ago. But they all boil down to one simple concept: a loss of trust.
The American economy is a little bit like Tinkerbell. It thrives when we believe in it, and it dims when we lose our faith. Unfortunately, merely saying “We do believe in capitalism, we do believe in capitalism” won’t stabilize the economy. To achieve economic recovery, we need to focus on restoring trust, and the only way to do that is to make ethical behavior, not just legal behavior, the rule and not the exception.