"We have not solved the causes of the 2008 crash: It is a matter of time before another crisis happens," or so argued Joris Luyendijk, a journalist who collaborates with the British newspaper The Guardian, during the Global Finance and the Moving Image conference. Organized by the Institute for Culture and Society, the School of Communication, the Social Trends Institute and St. Gallen University (Switzerland), the conference received funding from Zurich Insurance.

Luyendijk shared his experience in the financial world after infiltrating the London finance sector and conducting more than 200 interviews. The journalist has a pessimistic perspective: "Many bankers have learned from the crisis that they can get away with whatever they want since no one has gone to jail or lost money."

However, for Luyendijk, the real problem is not people, but rather the incentive system and the type of behavior it rewards. "Bankers who risk their money or reputation and end up winning see great profit; if it goes wrong, someone else pays the price," he notes.

On the other hand, the journalist warns that we might fall back into another crisis if we do not change financial habits. For him, "we are creating a new housing bubble because we refuse to accept that those prices were unrealistic."

Book of success

During his presentation entitled, “Greed is Good: How Bankers Imitate Hollywood Bad Boys,” he presented his book Swimming with Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers, which resulted from his journalistic investigation in London and has sold more than 500,000 copies.

The journalist started this project as a blog in which he tried to clarify the world of finance from the perspective of a citizen without expert knowledge of the field. The blog’s success motivated him to unify the stories into one volume.