Financial literacy and ethics. An Applied Linguistics’ perspective.

Ethics and finance seem to be incommensurable: almost every day are there news about unruly financial practices, tax evasion, and market manipulations. The complex interplay and interdependence between multitudes of stakeholders make it difficult to understand which parties and factors influence ethical behavior in the domain of finance. Moreover, vastly different levels of knowledge regarding financial principles and standards impede a common base for assessing ethical behavior. 

This is why behaving ethically in financial communication requires the knowledge of the underlying rules, principles, and mechanisms: Only if stakeholders understand what consequences their actions and behavior have, can they assess whether they act ethically or not in relation to these rules. In the context of widely accepted ethical rules, such behavior includes, e.g., investing in ethically sound projects and instruments, communicating in agreement with the stock market law, and setting up sustainable investment plans for the current and future wealth. 

Against this backdrop, my presentation explores the interplay and the tension between ethical behavior, society-at-large's financial literacy, and text products in financial communication. First, I define the key concepts of financial literacy, language awareness, and ethics in finance (part 1). Based on a long-term qualitative corpus (part 2), I use pragmatic text analysis to explain how the lack of intra-lingual and cross-domain translation affects stakeholders and how this impacts ethics in financial communication (part 3). The results suggest that texts in financial community bear the risk of partial communicative failure, which impedes the target readers to identify non-ethical behavior and to act ethically themselves (part 4). I conclude by explaining measures that can improve the communicative potential of financial text products and, by doing so, foster ethics in financial communication (part 5).