On that occasion, it occurred to me that the renowned economist and philosopher – and eventually Nobel laureate – Amartya Sen had given in these same rooms the first of our scholarly lectures entitled to the memory of our late governor Paolo Baffi. Sen’s lecture was on “Money and Value: on the Ethics and Economics of Finance”.
It is of course an interesting and good read in these difficult days. But what I was most intrigued by was Sen’s question: “How is it possible that an activity that is so useful has been viewed as morally so dubious?” There are indeed a good finance and a bad finance.