Simon,

I agree. But my point is that all kinds of undesireable practises are developing, and it is getting wider and wider by the hour.

All businesses, banking being prime among them, depend on integrity. A component of integrity is that we say what we mean and we mean what we say. This includes that the words that we use to communicate things do not have any special meaning to one side of the integrity equation. For example, if the tax man asks a business' finance person to let him review the company's books, he is expecting to get the complete and only version of the books and not some special copy designed and maintained only for review by tax men.

The majority still take "making a profit for the owners" in the context of what you have written. But a growing number are twisting it for their own purposes and not telling those others who should be told the special added qualifiers that they are applying to it in their own day-to-day practises. Qualifications (and resultant practises) that would be morally (or possibly even legally) unacceptable if they came to light. You can even bet that there are cases out there where such practitioners have managed to get government regulators on board, fooling them with words that say one thing but are then used for signficantly different objectives.

JimN

>Hi Jim
>
>It seems to me that the goal of business should be to make or product or offer a service to meet a genuine need. The necessity of business is that we make some profit but the goal of business should be to offer something of value for the benefit of the customer. If the goal of business is profit, then to all kinds of undesirable practices will develop.
>
>
>Simon
>
>>>SNIP
>>
>>Doug,
>>
>>Looks like we agree on the basics.
>>
>>My main point is that, very soon now I believe, we will really have to take away that line of "making profit for their owners" as justification for business decisions. This is because it has come to mean two different things to two widely disparate groups of individuals.
>>
>>The 'moral/altruistic" group uses it in the traditional sense while the (growing too fast) business leaders group (and their sycophants) use it as 'code' to mean "go ahead and do whatever it takes regardless of the external concequences".
>>
>>I see a possible solution as stopping to use that phrase and questioning for precise details whenever someone else uses it to justify something.
>>
>>Jim