Corporate scandals, across the globe, over the past few years came as a shock not just because of the enormity of failures, but also because of the discovery that questionable accounting practices was far more insidious and widespread than previously envisioned. In this paper, an attempt is made to line up the causes which made the financial crisis so grave, and investigates how far the shareholder's wealth maximization objective has influenced the global financial crisis. Case reviews of individuals and world level role models of financial crisis have been cited in this paper which provides evidences of information that many of them were intentional and man made frauds. Though the range of contribution varies, reversal of housing booms, unethical behavior, CEO's compensation issues, creative accounting and its consequences, conflicts of interest, over-leveraging, exchange traded funds, credit default swaps including 'securitized' mortgages, banks credit unions, real estate agents, money laundering, range of non-financial transactions provided by accountants, lawyers and company service providers, contribution of financial instruments etc., has adequately contributed to this menace. Though many studies have been conducted to unveil the reasons for the global financial crisis, this study tries to bring specifically the impact of corporate objective function of shareholder wealth maximization into limelight. Shareholder wealth maximization is regarded as the underlying purpose of corporate activity. This study brings out the fact that the overemphasis given to this aspect can lead to a situation where the ethical, social and the financial system of the global economy as a whole can be disturbed. How powerful the wealth maximization objective is to shake the global economic system is not much discussed by researchers and hence, through this conceptual paper, an attempt is made to fill this lacuna.Apart from the role of corporate objective function of shareholder wealth maximization in GFC, this paper has only identified and discussed briefly the other factors that contributed to GFC. However, the discussion of cause and effect of these factors are beyond the scope of this study
