Lending practices to countries affect economic and ethical issues due to the way a country balances the wants of the influential minority against the needs of the powerless majority who frequently bear the brunt of the loan repayments. In a global setting it is an almost insurmountable obstacle to resolve ethical conflicts to provide equitable solutions that benefit all parties. For example, loans made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to economically vulnerable countries, such as former colonies, demonstrate an enduring form of colonialism referred to in this paper as ‘economic colonialism’. However, one of the negative side effects of economic colonialism is a loss of cultural identity. Culture is reflected in the learned and shared values, behavioral characteristics, attitudes and beliefs of that population. Currently, globalization results in cultural hybridization that may seem like an emancipating experience, but cultural disempowerment of the locals is seldom emancipatory. As globalization continues to be normalized in our collective personal and business thinking it would be extremely difficult to retard or indeed reverse the negative effects of globalization. It is argued in this paper that globalization will lead to the homogenization of culture, identity and cultural experience, thus obliterating the differences between locality-defined cultures that had constituted our identities. Globalization will create a new meta-culture for the world and its collective identity will be based on shared patterns of consumption. Globalization requires consensus on global ethics otherwise it puts at risk the cultural identity of the weaker party at the bargaining table.