November 07, 2009

Profit is not satanic,” John Varley, the chief executive of Barclays, told an audience at St. Martin-in-the-Fields church here this week.The day before, Josef Ackermann, the chief executive of Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest bank, had insisted at a conference here, “Size is not necessarily evil.”

While not exactly Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech from the movie “Wall Street,” Brian Griffiths, an adviser to Goldman Sachs International, said during a recent panel discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral on “the place of morality in the marketplace,” that bonuses would encourage charity and lift the economy.“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Mr. Griffiths said.