The current financial turbulence, whatever its immediate effects, is systemic in nature. It is a symptom of the steadily increasing pressure which undermines the material, social, and intellectual aspects and ethics of the liberal socioeconomic system. There is a real risk that if this pressure is not reduced, the market economy will be deflected from its primary vocation, that of promoting the dignity and wellbeing of humankind. Society is never set in stone; it is characterised by an ongoing quest for what is best adapted to current circumstances and today is no exception. During the last thirty years, finance has increased not only its share of economic activity but also its impact on the public's perceptions and aspirations. This process has transformed both our economy and our society by increasingly organising it around the search for financial efficiency. Today, pushed to its extremes, this tendency is coming close to breaking point. After so many years of the process sometimes called "financialisation", the state of the economic and social system is worrying on more than one count: • "Financialisation" has led to the almost total triumph of transactions over relationships. Contemporary finance has prevailed because it has gone to extremes in the search for capital gains and instant results. At the same time, patience, loyalty, enduring relationships, and trust have been undermined, leading to increased distrust. The liquidity of financial markets is nothing more than a mechanical substitute for interpersonal trust. • The ethos of efficiency has become the ultimate criterion of judgement. If pushed to the limit, a preoccupation with efficiency leads to internal procedures which distribute tasks and responsibilities following increasingly strict guidelines, until the point of "ethical alienation" has been reached. Staff find that the phrase meaningful employment no longer holds true; it is displaced merely by gainful employment . • The ethos of efficiency, when disassociated from moral considerations, has led to the increasingly brutal expression of greed. This is obvious in the subservience of trust to transactions. Repeated acts of self-interest can drive any society to desperation. The free market, based on its participants having a sense of responsibility, is about to be replaced by a "greed" market, which will require escalating controls and costs in both the public and private sectors. This, in turn, will breed unwillingness amongst those involved to take individual responsibility for their actions. This analysis suggests that the fundamental values of free judgement, responsibility and solidarity – without which common good becomes an empty concept, and without which a free and humane society cannot exist - are under threat. The purpose of the Robin Cosgrove Prize for Ethics in Finance is to promote original thinking and proposals within the young generation, so that they could help to carry out a critique - in the positive sense of the term - of the public's perceptions underlying contemporary economic and financial theories and practices. This critique would include both their relation to social and economic realities and the conceptual and ethical dimensions of their underlying assumptions. This should generate new solutions - both conceptual and practical - that reinstate the primacy of ethical concerns over the preoccupation with economic and financial efficiency. Such solutions will most probably encourage the development of long-term commitments, as opposed to instantaneous and anonymous transactions, in all aspects of economic and financial life.