Thomas Friedman has a great Op-Ed out today on how the President could use his powers of inspiration to address the financial crisis.

This line from Dov Sidman’s book “How” provides insight on how the President might use rhetoric to help navigate us out of the crisis.

“Laws tell you what you can do. Values inspire in you what you should do. It’s a leader’s job to inspire in us those values.”

I couldn’t agree more with Friedman’s assessment, there’s an absence of values in our financial sector that culminate to create an agenda based on getting rich quick, gambling big regardless of how those bets might impact the collective, and the inability to accept responsibility.

Now to be clear, a blame game is not what we need. There are a variety of factors that led to this mess, and trying to dissect the crisis to identify the main culprits shouldn’t be a priority right now. What we do need to be doing is understanding the crisis so as to prevent a sequel.

Now where does the President fit into all of this? President Obama has been using his soap box as of late to lavish his praises on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Inspiring confidence in the architect of the solution is certainly important, however it fails to address the concerns associated with his proposal. An increase of transparency is necessary and the full roll out of the banking plan this week will hopefully include more details. Still, transparency alone will not make this a teachable moment. What needs to be addressed is how we go about changing the general approach of how business is done in Washington and on Wall Street. We already know that greed and irresponsibility lead to current crisis, now what will get us out?

That hasn’t been articulated as clearly- I’d like to see the President outline why investors and bankers should remain cognoscente of how their actions impact society as a whole- it seems like an obvious answer but perhaps this is a moment that requires stating and repeating the obvious until it sticks. The President has indicated that additional regulations will be put in place to prevent irresponsible wheeling and dealing from reoccurring, that’s great, but unless the attitude that inspired those transactions is confronted than surely the overly ambitious would find a way to get around those regulations.

In addition to new laws we need an ethical framework that helps us navigate those laws that goes back to a national sentiment that Barack Obama reminded us of when he first entered the national scene “E Pluribus Unum”

Out of many. One.