The whole world, and not just Britain, is broken, with continents such as Africa feeling forgotten and uncared for, the Archbishop of Canterbury said in the heart of New York’s financial district yesterday.
Any money men who might have happened in to Trinity Wall Street to shelter from the snow would have found a different sort of chill as Dr Rowan Williams delivered his lesson.
Standing at the lectern of the famously wealthy US Episcopal church, which lies at the head of Wall Street, the leader of the Anglican Communion condemned the “straw man” of self-interest.
His theme was that financiers, wordsmiths ”” in fact anyone in the Western world connected in any way with economic reality ”” should look at themselves in the mirror and repent.
Physician, heal thyself! Until +Cantaur does something meaningful to heal his own communion he’s not going to have much credibility calling on anyone else to repent.
The ABC has become so irrelevant I have quit reading any postings about him. #1 is correct.
“Standing at the lectern of the famously wealthy US Episcopal church, which lies at the head of Wall Street, the leader of the Anglican Communion condemned the “straw man†of self-interest.
His theme was that financiers, wordsmiths — in fact anyone in the Western world connected in any way with economic reality — should look at themselves in the mirror and repent.”
And then, when he finishes his sojourn to the US, ++Rowan Williams will take his first class seat on an airliner and fly home to his palace, filled with millions of dollars of antiques and artworks, and lament the state of the impoverished masses of Africa, Asia and Haiti.
Wait, wait,,,don’t tell me! He flew over on a lead baloon, right? LOL
We would be hard-put to identify an economic system which has provided more wealth, health and opportunity to more people than the present one. Certainly laws are required (and are present) to prevent fraud and abuse. Decency, honesty, and compassion cannot be imposed from outside. Countless employers and business people, whether in small companies or large, conduct themselves with integrity routinely. Blaming “the system” for the failures and sins of individuals within it misses the point.
Shocking how much esteem for the office of the ABC this man has utterly squandered and lost.
Very well said Katherine, as usual. My sentiments exactly.
Maybe he should have mentioned that bankers were “selling expensive mortgages to the poor” because they were required to do so by the federal Community Reinvestment Act and other policies of the federal government.
Just one example, the HUD National Homeowner Strategy of 1994:
“The inability (either real or perceived) of many younger families to qualify for a mortgage is widely recognized as a very serious barrier to homeownership. The National Homeownership Strategy commits both government and the mortgage industry to a number of initiatives designed to:
Cut transaction costs through streamlined regulations and
technological and procedural efficiences.
Reduce downpayment requirements and interest costs by making terms more flexible, providing subsidies to low- and
moderate-income families, and creating incentives to save for
homeownership.
Increase the availability of alternative financing products in housing
markets throughout the country.
Sarah,
[blockquote]Shocking how much esteem for the office of the ABC this man has utterly squandered and lost.[/blockquote]
I agree but how would you characterize/classify his failure(s)?
He is not a drunkard or an adulterer or even an uncharitable fellow. He seems to reflect the seven heavenly virtues. Is he simply a good man in the wrong job?
I think one can be a good man and utterly incompetent.
But I think, beyond incompetence, there is the whole problem with his deliberate and repeated sabotages. That is somewhat worse than . . . mere incompetence.
Sarah,
Thanks for the response. Then at least in one sense, he is in the wrong job. If one is trained as an MD then one would not be a trustworthy welder without those skills. But then you raise the question of his history of intentional sabotage. This is an entirely different issue. What you describe is not the activity of a peacemaker. Does this make him a false shepherd? If this is the case, then it is much more serious than a good man in the wrong job (incompetence).
The commentators have done a very good job of going ad hominem, with a variety of assertions, insinuations and winking. It does seem there is a desire to avoid the subject.
#8 is empirically false. The act was passed in 1977. If it were truly the case, wouldn’t this have happened earlier? Jim seems to forget the invention of various loan products and the numerous incentives (bonuses, for example), that fostered the various events. Blaming the poor is always a pleasant attribute, and greed is a fairly universal characteristic, but it does seem to me that it’s the wealth that get away with gaming the system, while we wag our fingers at the poor.
Katherine insinuates that compassion can’t be legislated – and she is probably right. However, there can be practical incentives made so that the mean, callous and greedy find it not worth the effort to exploit others. I’m not interested in people being “nice” but in the idea that small business people get a fair shake when playing by the rules; that insiders don’t get all the benefits; and that managers don’t take advantage of stockholders; and that the banks don’t take advantage of the public. Yes, we have the greatest system: And thank God the government invested in soldiers through the GI bill, our trains, roads, universities, NASA, and all sorts of other government entitlements that have also allowed businesses to prosper.
RE: “The commentators have done a very good job of going ad hominem, with a variety of assertions, insinuations and winking. It does seem there is a desire to avoid the subject.”
Well no. John doesn’t understand the meaning of the phrase “ad hominem” which has to do with thinking that an argument about an idea is made by attacking the idea’s *messenger*. But nobody here attempted to make an argument about an idea by attacking the messenger. Those expressing their beliefs about the messenger [i]didn’t even address his topic[/i] as we didn’t care to.
My assertion about the nature of RW was in no way making any kind of “argument” or *attempted* argument about his idea. In fact, it was a comment on the fact that he has squandered and trashed the reputation of the ABC, so much so that people like me don’t give a flying rat’s ass about his opinions about the economy or pretty much anything else. That is not an “ad hominem” argument — my assertion about the nature of RW *makes no argument at all* but merely asserts an opinion about the buffoonishness of the speaker.
RE: “Blaming the poor is always a pleasant attribute . . . ”
Sure but as nobody blamed the poor but rather blamed the State, JW yet again simply throws a bit of red herring into his assertions, not unlike the “ad hominem” [sic] red herring.
The question is, does JW throw in random red herrings into his strings of assertions and casual misappropriations of terms because he knows those assertions are as weak as stumpwater? Or is it more like an unconscious “tic” that comes with having the rhetorical integrity of a deconstructionist? Are the red herring flings more deliberate and calculated, or merely “nature”?
One watches with curiosity.
#12–As someone who has been involved in banking law since the 1980s, I have to say you are utterly and totally wrong. Beginning in the early and mid-90s, because of political pressure by primarily ethnic pressure groups (read, “community organizers”) regulated banks were forced to commit obscene amounts of money to underwrite risky residential loans to the “disadvantaged” under the CRA and related programs.
How did this happen? Every time a regulated financial institution came in for approval to change a territory or merge with another institution, the federal government forced the institution to commit to high-risk CRA lending.
The worst one I can remember was the merger of Bank of America and Nations Bank in the mid 1990s. As a condition of merger, Bank of America was required to commit to lending [b]$350 billion[/b] in high risk residential loans to disadvantaged communities. By 2004, the extorted commitment amount for Bank of America [b]alone[/b] was up to [b]$750 billion[/b]. When you start multiplying this kind of foolishness out among all financial institutions, you quickly see how government mis-managed regulation under CRA created this problem.
A lot of this stuff has been scrubbed off the internet in intervening years, but if you don’t believe me, you can see references to the BOA commitments at the following links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America (see “Social Responsibility”)
http://www.consumersunion.org/finance/bofacommentswc698.htm
http://triangle.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/1998/06/01/story8.html
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=LkLF0TqpWrQytqy56WbTzQTt1XzVyKnCBvvXXSn71Tr8J1BHTpJq!-1679437133!1680139891?docId=5001361559
http://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/index.php?s=63&item=43
Institutions like Bank of America and many other banks couldn’t make this volume of high-risk loans by themselves. So how did they fulfill their commitments? By obligating themselves to lend to and buy paper from “community development banks” and “opportunity mortgage lenders” (read, “subprime lenders” and “mortgage backed securities”). Combine that with Fannie/Freddy and their lax underwriting policies, that were also churning out bad paper like crazy (no down payment loans in states with anti-deficiency legislation so the borrower has absolutely no personal obligation to repay the loan or any personal investment in the property), and you have an eventual nightmare on your hands.
https://www.efanniemae.com/sf/ip/cra/mbs.jsp (on CRA mortgage-backed securities)
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/community/investments/cra02-2/mbs.pdf
http://www.ccmfixedincome.com/files/Bank Winter Newsletter Final.pdf
Thus, the CRA managed to reach out and poison the entire lending structure of this country through encouraging high-risk lending, both through requiring that regulated financial institutions lend on conditions that no prudent lender would otherwise lend under, and by then encouraging creation of financial instruments to “spread the risk” of these loans. The toxic high risk loans themselves were unmarketable on the secondary market, but when they were mixed with higher grade loans and the whole package sold off in various tranches as mortgage backed securities, that allowed the financial institutions to then spread the risk of these loans through the entire financial community, i.e., insurance companies, pension plans, etc.
In my opinion, there are people in Congress and in the regulatory and housing agencies and government supported lenders that should be in prison because of what they did. There were repeated warnings by regulators in the Bush administration that we were headed for a collapse, but those regulators were belittled and bullied into silence by Congressional representatives such as Barney Frank.