Don't blame the bankers - deregulation and spending caused it too, says Williams

[CHIMO]

Blaming the greed of individual bankers for the financial crisis was too easy and people should instead be asking profound questions about how poorly regulated economies obsessed with ever-growing consumer choice have skewed the judgments of entire countries, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

The Right Rev Rowan Williams used a lecture in Cardiff at the weekend to deliver a wide-ranging attack on a globalised economic system which had been "spectacularly successful in generating purchasing power" but which had also led us to "the most radical insecurity imaginable".

As economists struggle to find technical solutions to the recession, which has brought interests rates to their lowest level in 300 years and forced the government to cut VAT in an effort to get shoppers back into the high street, he said ordinary people had to ask themselves difficult questions about their own lives.

In future politicians and economists would have to move away from the idea that wealth and profit could be achieved without risk. He called for a "return to the primitive capitalist idea" of risk-sharing. He also demanded that environmental costs should be factored into all future economic calculations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/09/deregulation-spending-banking

[w4rma]

1. Who lobbied for that deregulation: the bankers. Blame the bankers. (nt)

[Deja Q]

2. Facts are useless things.

:shrug:

[CHIMO]

6. They Were

Only doing what they were allowed to do. One has to also blame the gate keepers.
The other possible alternative is to get rid of paid lobbyists.

[w4rma]

8. That only gets rid of the middle man. The bankers wanted this and they got it.

And they got obscenely wealthy off of ruining the U.S. economy, while they looted the banks they ran while they cooked the books and ran them into the ground.

[valerief]

3. So if a jewelry store doesn't lock its door for the night and a thief steals

diamonds, the thief is not to blame?

[CHIMO]

5. Of Course

The thief is to blame. You are not allowed to steal.

Bankers don't steal. They just become too fat to fail.

[valerief]

7. Got it. I guess I don't have the catch-phrases down pat yet. I'm letting reason get in the way.

:eyes:

[FreakinDJ]

4. Doesn't explain 1/2 of it = "Half Truths"

[CHIMO]

9. Patience and trust - the new economic foundations

Full text of Ethics, Economics and Global Justice

In a conversation a couple of months ago at Canary Wharf, a senior manager in financial services observed that recent years had seen an erosion of the notion that certain enterprises necessarily took time to deliver and that therefore it was a mistake to look for maximal profits on the basis of a balance sheet covering only one or two years. There had been, he suggested, a deep and systemic impatience with the whole idea of taking time to arrive at a desired goal – and thus with a great deal of the understanding of both labour and the building of confidence. Either an enterprise delivered or it didn't, and the question could be answered in a brief and measurable time-span.

For all the rhetoric about accountability, getting your money's worth, the effect of such assumptions in all kinds of settings has been a spectacular failure to understand the variety of ways in which responsible practice might be gauged – whether in relation to investment in actual production or in relation to new financial products, whose sustainability and reliability can only be proved after the passage of time. Very much the same kind of impatience has also been part of the tidal wave of assault on the historic professions – including the law, teaching and academic research and some aspects of public service. The short-term curse continues to afflict the voluntary sector in the absurd timescales attached to grant-giving; but all that is material for a lecture in its own right …

But in connection specifically with the financial crisis, the main point is about what appropriate patience might look like where various financial and commercial enterprises are concerned. The loss of a sense of appropriate time is a major cultural development, which necessarily changes how we think about trust and relationship. Trust is learned gradually, rather than being automatically deliverable according to a set of static conditions laid down. It involves a degree of human judgement, which in turn involves a level of awareness of one's own human character and that of others – a degree of literacy about the signals of trustworthiness; a shared culture of understanding what is said and done in a human society.

And this learning entails unavoidable insecurity. I do not control others and I do not control the passage of time and the processes of nature; even the ­processes of human labour are limited by things outside my control (the capacities of human bodies). My lack of a definitive and authoritative or universal perspective means that I may make mistakes because I misread others or because I miscalculate the levels of uncertainty in the processes I deal in. And the further away I get from these areas of learning by trial and error, the further away I get from the inevitable risks of living in a material and limited world, the more easily can I persuade myself that I am after all in control.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/09/rowan-williams-lecture-full-text

Well. Guess what. A reading of the full transcript doesn't give me the same headline.

It is a bit long and probably needs a few re-readings over a few days to digest.