Friday Fun…..

A pack of “wolves” invade Wall Street as a promotion for the Blu-Ray release of The Wolf of Wall Street.
IMAGE: DIANE BONDAREFF/INVISION FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A new report suggests that instilling ethics in Wall Street may be as hard as teaching an old dog new tricks.

Years after a worldwide financial crisis battered the industry, bankers continue to engage in much of the same unethical conduct that helped trigger the meltdown, a survey of financial professionals in the United States and the United Kingdom finds.

In the wake of the collapse, Congress passed the Dodd Frank Act in 2010, a bundle of sweeping financial reforms billed as the biggest overhaul of banking rules since the Great Depression. Firms committed to rein in the industry’s Wild West culture, and regulatory agencies vowed to double down on fraud.

But the latest survey, conducted by Notre Dame and Labaton Sucharow, a New York law firm known for protecting financial whistleblowers, indicates that the financial sector may be increasingly reverting to old habits.

Nearly a quarter of the 1,200 financial workers surveyed said they suspected their colleagues had engaged in unethical or illegal activity Nearly a quarter of the 1,200 financial workers surveyed said they suspected their colleagues had engaged in unethical or illegal activity in order to get an edge in the market. That’s nearly double the number that a similar survey reported in 2012.

Additionally, nearly 50% said their rivals had likely cheated to get ahead, and about one in five said that breaking the rules is necessary for success in the hyper-competitive industry. Both figures represent a significant jump from three years ago.

Each of these stats is slightly higher among those with salaries of half a million dollars or more, implying that wrongdoing may proliferate as Wall Street’s workers gain more pay and experience.

What’s more is that workers who speak out about ethical breaches may face consequences, according to the survey. One fifth of those polled said that they would fear retaliation from their firms if they reported issues to regulators.

“When corporate whistleblowers are prohibited, discouraged or retaliated against for reporting crime to cops, we should all be scared—very scared,” Jordan Thomas, a Labatan partner who co-authored the report said in a statement.

The troubling backslide in attitudes towards ethics shows that more reform is still needed to achieve a real change in industry culture, according to co-author Ann Tenbrunsel, business ethics professor at the Mendoza College of Business.

“Despite significant energy and efforts, it appears we need to continue to think about how to improve the culture of ethics in the financial services industry,” Tenbrunsel said.

Source: Patrick Kulp, Mashable

Wrong! Wrong Wrong!

From i100 independent.co.uk

A new book about the gut that has sold more than a million copies in Germany would make ideal loo reading, had it not included a chapter about the problem of sitting down to defecate.

We did not evolve to linger on porcelain thrones, you see, and in those countries where squatting remains normal, colons and their owners are demonstrably happier.

“There is a muscle that encircles the gut like a lasso when we are sitting… creating a kink in the tube,” Giulia Enders explains in Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ.

She calls the mechanism “an extra insurance policy and cites studies showing that squatters, with their unkinked guts, are less susceptible to haemorrhoids and constipation.

Enders first got noticed – and a book deal – after a self-assured turn at a science slam in Berlin three years ago. Her 10-minute lecture went viral on YouTube, and now, weeks after completing her final exams as a doctoral student, she is a publishing sensation. Her book, called Darm Mit Charme (“Charming Bowels”) in Germany, has sold more than 1.3 million copies since it came out last year. Rights have been sold to dozens of countries including the US, and her UK publisher ordered thousands more copies last week, days after the book went on sale.

The German’s way into the gut is a lightness that some reviewers have found too childish or lacking in scientific rigour to be taken seriously. But there is something compelling and refreshing about her curiosity and popular approach. “When I read the research, I think: Why don’t people know about this – why am I reading about it in some paper or specialist magazine? It’s ridiculous because everyone has to deal with it on a daily basis. I want to transport that feeling I had to more people.”

‘Gut: The Inside Story Of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ’ by Giulia Enders (Scribe, £14.99) is out now

And the point is?

If you want to be the writer of a best selling book

Sh*t sells

There’s hope for all of us then! Happy writing!