Young, bright and ambitious people in conjunction with huge financial incentives and desire to succeed professionally is a very dangerous cocktail from ethical perspective. Even for those very aware of ethical issues it is very difficult to reject doing something they’ve been told to do when the outcome will be losing a lot of money, losing their job (with very low prospects of finding another one) or being looked down by you peers.

A real change will happen when regulators, the industry and the society start to focus on how to change the culture of the financial institutions from top to bottom. In critical environments, you can’t rely only on people doing the right thing at the right moment. You need to have a system with the adequate incentives to do so. If you are going to pay millions in bonuses for a 100bp more of yield in a short term no matter if your strategy is a way to a global disaster that will cost billions, problems will arise. If your front desk employees will earn millions per year but your risk management team is look as a sink cost, problems will arise. If someone raise an unethical or illegal issue and he/she is fired and his/her peers are promoted, the outcome will be what we have now.

The industry and regulators are in a “blame the pilot” mode. The easiest is to blame individuals as “bad apples” who made the wrong thing as solitaire wolfs. We cannot think in prosecution and enforcement as "the" answer. They are necessary but they will not be a long term and real solution if the financial industry does not provide the right incentives for people to make the right thing.