Abstract

Today's financial crisis is a good opportunity to explore the social mechanisms that produce and destroy systemic trust and the reputation of financial institutions. After an analysis of the role of reputation in an uncertain world - like the financial one - the article focuses on how reputation is built and propagated. Special attention is given to reputational diffusers and to the central question: "who guards the guardians of the financial markets?". Finally, some suggestions are made to explain how reputation is constructed by political systems through the continuous production of new rules and new organizational forms to be adopted by the regulators.