Bankers have failed to repent for their roles in the global financial collapse, said the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, leader of the Anglican Church.
“There hasn’t been a feeling of closure about what happened last year — there hasn’t been what I as a Christian would call repentance,” Williams said in a British Broadcasting Corp. interview yesterday. “We haven’t heard people saying, ”˜Actually, no, we got it wrong, and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty.’ ”
Williams is the most senior cleric in the church, which has 80 million members in 164 countries. He has called for stricter financial regulations and caps on bonuses for bankers.
The +ABC’s comments at best are naive and borderline incoherent. Banks are the most regulated entities around. They play by the rules dealt out to them by the governments which regulate them. In the US banks were forced to make loans to folks who could not repay them. Fannie and Freddie were buying up bank paper that they knew was of low quality. By buying all that paper they encouraged the banks to keep lending in the same reckless ways. Massive capital flowed into housing and we had a huge bubble that burst. Did the CoE buy faulty mortgage paper? Is that how the Church colluded? What the heck did that mean?
For all the liberal angst about bonuses, you never hear anything about the huge bonuses paid to the Fannie and Freddie exec’s. Remember, they were found to be cooking the books to gin up those bonuses to higher levels. Is that what the +ABC was referring to?
And what does he mean about the “bonus mentality”? Bonuses are paid by private companies to employees who meet and exceed performance targets. If you are a huge company, the aggregate of bonuses are pretty large. So what? It is none of his business and none of government’s business. Unless of course he subscribes to the liberal mantra of equal outcomes? Given his pronouncements on other issues, that would be no surprise at all, would it?
This seems like a mote and log situation. Perhaps if the ABC finally showed some leadership and repented for failing to provide leadership of the Anglican Communion; for failing to exercise any discipline against the TEC and like-minded schismatics and heretics, then others might follow his lead and repent.
I thought you were supposed to repent for sins, not for mistakes. Just like a fuzzy headed liberal cleric to rely on Pharisaic rules to govern people’s lives according to the rules he wants. If he represents Anglicanism, why would anybody want to be an Anglican. Jeesh!
Here was a clear chance to ask that the United States repent of its action that colapsed the world economy – but, no, it is the banks that are ask to repent.
Are the Brits now Amera-centric?
Don
#1 has it exactly backwards. The banks lending on subprime and pay option ARM loans did so because they were HUGELY profitable, as much as 5-10 times what they could make on Fannie-Freddie. But they were profitable because the risk was badly mispriced (and transfered to the secondary market). When the inevitable collapse in the dangerous loans began a downward spiral that soon swept up even loans made to responsible standards, such as F-F.
While the lenders were regulated to varying degrees, the derivatives that created the massive demand (and relaxed standards) for mortgages were largely unregulated. The ratings agencies that rated all those CDOs as AAA were a huge factor in creating that demand for derivatives.
However, the bottom line was that lenders knew that in making those bad loans they were throwing out the underwriting rules. But they did so out of greed, believing that they were shifting the risk to others.