미국처럼 금융자유화를 진척시킴으로써 이번에 벌어진 금융위기로 심각한 피해를 입은 영국에서 위기를 만들어 낸 자본주의의 현상에 대해 교회의 성직자가 잇따라 비판의 목소리를 내고 있다.
세계 성공회의 수장이라 할 수 있는 로윈 윌리엄즈 켄터베리 대주교는 "마르크스가 자본주의에 대해서는 부분적으로는 옳았다"고 언급하는 등, 종교인으로서는 이례적인 발언을 쏟아내고 있다. 또한 센타무 요크 대주교도 국제은행가협회의 기도회에 초대받아 HBOS가 로이드은행에 넘어간 사실을 지적하며 그 은행가을 '은행강도'라고 지칭하기도 하였다는 것이다.
*왼쪽이 윌리엄즈 켄터베리 대주교. 오른쪽은 센타무 요크 대주교. 사진출처: http://www.nytimes.com
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Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, says that the financial world needs fresh scrutiny and regulation. In our attitude to the market, we run the risk of idolatry
Readers of Anthony Trollope will remember how thoughtless and greedy young men in the Victorian professions can be lured into ruin by accepting ‘accommodation bills’ from their shifty acquaintances. They make themselves liable for the debts of others; and only too late do they discover that they are trapped in a web of financial mechanics that forces them to pay hugely inflated sums for obligations or services they have had nothing to do with. Their own individual credit-worthiness, their own circumstances, even their own personal choices are all irrelevant: the debt has acquired a life of its own, quite independent of any real transaction they are involved in.
A prescient student of Trollope would have seen that he is identifying an endemic feature of the world of borrowing and lending. A lender takes a calculated risk in offering the use of their money to someone else, and rates of interests express the recognition of this — and the rewards that may be secured for taking such a risk. But it is not too difficult to see how the notional gain involved here can be used as security against a further risk. And so the transaction moves further and further from the original transaction with its realistic assessment of levels of risk within the context of measurable standards of credit-worthiness. Any face-to-face element, any direct calculation of what and who is reasonably worth trusting (which assumes some common frame of reference), fades away. Like Trollope’s hapless young clerics and feckless young landowners, individuals find that their own personal financial decisions and calculations have nothing to do with what is happening to their resources, in a process for which a debt is simply someone else’s wholly disposable asset.
It is a sort of one-syllable nursery parable of what the last couple of weeks have illustrated in the world of global finance and, of course, a reminder that what we have been witnessing is not just the product of a couple of irresponsible decades.
Trading the debts of others without accountability has been the motor of astronomical financial gain for many in recent years. Primitively, a loan transaction is something which enables someone to do what they might not otherwise be able to do — start a business, buy a house. Lenders identify what would count as reasonable security in the present and the future (present assets, future income) and decide accordingly.
But inevitably in complex and large-scale transactions, one person’s debt becomes part of the security which the lender can offer to another potential customer. And a particularly significant line is crossed when the borrowing and lending are no longer to do with any kind of equipping someone to do something specific, but exclusively about enabling profit — sometimes, as with the now banned practice of short-selling, by effectively betting on the failure of a partner in the transaction.
This crisis exposes the element of basic unreality in the situation — the truth that almost unimaginable wealth has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders. But while we are getting used to this sudden vision of the Emperor’s New Clothes, there are one or two questions that, in government as in society at large, we at last have a chance to ask. Some of these are elementary and practical. Given that the risk to social stability overall in these processes has been shown to be so enormous, it is no use pretending that the financial world can maintain indefinitely the degree of exemption from scrutiny and regulation that it has got used to. To grant that without a basis of some common prosperity and stability, no speculative market can long survive is not to argue for rigid Soviet-style centralised direction. Insecure or failed states may provide a brief and golden opportunity for profiteering, but cannot sustain reliable institutions.
Without a background of social stability everyone will eventually suffer, including even the most resourceful, bold and ingenious of speculators. The question is not how to choose between total control and total deregulation, but how to identify the points and practices where social risk becomes unacceptably high. The banning of short-selling is an example of just such a judgment. Governments should not lose their nerve as they look to identify a few more targets.
Behind all this, though, is the deeper moral issue. We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors. We expect an abstraction called ‘the market’ to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses by a sort of natural innate prudence, like a physical organism or ecosystem. We appeal to ‘business’ to acquire public responsibility and moral vision. And so we lose sight of the fact that the market is not like a huge individual consciousness, that business is a practice carried on by persons who have to make decisions about priorities — not a machine governed by inexorable laws.
And this is part of the same mindset that turns the specific, goal-related transactions of borrowing and lending into a process producing pseudo-things, paper assets — but pseudo-things that (when matters do not go well) cause real and crippling damage to actual persons and institutions. The biggest challenge in the present crisis is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality — the production of specific things, the achievement of recognisably human goals that have something to do with a shared sense of what is good for the human community in the widest sense.
Of course business is not philanthropy, securing profit is a legitimate (if not a morally supreme) motivation for people, and the definition of what’s good for the human community can be pretty widely drawn. It’s true as well that, in some circumstances, loosening up a financial regime to allow for entrepreneurs and innovators to create wealth is necessary to draw whole populations out of poverty. But it is a sort of fundamentalism to say that this alone will secure stable and just outcomes everywhere.
Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of the problem. Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry. What the present anxieties and disasters should be teaching us is to ‘keep ourselves from idols’, in the biblical phrase. The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose — which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.
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이에 대해 <뉴욕타임즈>는 아래와 같이 보도하고 있다.
*Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, blamed a reckless pursuit of short-term profit as a cause of the financial crisis. 사진출처: http://www.nytimes.com/
Criticizing Capitalism From the Pulpit
출처: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/business/worldbusiness/26euro.html?ref=worldbusiness
PARIS — Whatever happened to “God helps those who help themselves?”
Even religious leaders have joined the chorus of Europeans criticizing unbridled, American-style capitalism, which Continental politicians have cited as a root cause of the global financial crisis.
The archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wrote this week in The Spectator, a British magazine, that placing too much trust in the market had become a kind of “idolatry.” At the same time, he reminded readers of Karl Marx’s criticism of laissez-faire capitalism, noting, “He was right about that, if about little else.”
Mr. Williams, the spiritual leader of the Anglican church, called for increased regulation of financial markets, praising regulators’ moves to curb short-selling in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and sharp declines in the share prices of other financial institutions.
“Governments should not lose their nerve as they look to identify a few more targets,” he added.
In the trans-Atlantic sniping over the causes and solutions to the credit crunch, Mr. Williams’s scolding tone has been echoed by some European politicians.
Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, blamed a reckless pursuit of short-term profit and outsize bonuses in “Anglo-American” financial centers — as well as a lack of backbone among policy makers unwilling to stand up to this greed.
Addressing the Bundestag Thursday, he said, the long-term consequences would be punitive for American prestige.
“The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system,” Mr. Steinbrück said. “The world financial system will become multipolar.”
Mr. Steinbrück reaffirmed the German government’s opposition to a costly bailout of the financial system. The Bush administration has called on other countries to join in its proposed $700 billion cleanup of troubled bank assets.
Mr. Steinbrück, like Mr. Williams, also urged policy makers to enhance financial oversight.
The Wall Street crisis, with its complex arcana — collateralized debt obligations and the like — might seem like unusual waters for a religious leader to wade into, but Mr. Williams has not shied away from making headlines on sensitive subjects. He caused gasps in Britain earlier this year, for instance, when he said there might be a role for Islamic Shariah law in settling disputes within the British Muslim community.
Another British clergyman, John Sentamu, the archbishop of York, was even less circumspect than Mr. Williams in criticizing hedge funds that had sold short the shares of a British bank, HBOS, forcing it in an emergency sale to a rival, Lloyds TSB.
They were “clearly bank robbers and asset strippers,” he said in a speech Wednesday evening.
Mr. Williams did not specifically blame the United States for the crisis — British investors profited as much as American high-rollers from the boom, and the bust has hit London almost as hard as New York — but Mr. Steinbrück did.
“The United States is the source and the obvious focus of the crisis,” he said, adding that it had spread from America to Europe like a “toxic oil slick.” Mr. Steinbrück said he saw no reason for Germany or other European countries to take part in a bailout.
He argued that the German financial system had weathered the storm better in part because it was anchored by universal banks like Deutsche Bank, with operations that span consumer lending and investment banking. The last two big independent investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, have moved toward such a model since the crisis deepened.
Mr. Steinbrück said European banks would now play a greater role in the world financial system.
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출처: http://www.archbishopofyork.org/1981
Archbishop Labels HBOS short sellers as "Bank Robbers"
The Archbishop of York has spoken of his outrage at those responsible for short selling shares in HBOS labelling those responsible as "bank robbers" and "asset strippers".
Addressing the annual dinner of the Institute of Worshipful Company of International Bankers at Drapers Hall in the City of London, Dr. Sentamu said:
"To a bystander like me, those who made £190million deliberately underselling the shares of HBOS, in spite of its very strong capital base, and drove it into the bosom of Lloyds TSB Bank, are clearly bank robbers and asset strippers.
"We find ourselves in a market system which seems to have taken its rules of trade from Alice in Wonderland, where the share value of a bank is no longer dependent on the strength of its performance but rather on the willingness of the Government to bail it out, or rather on whether the Government has announced its intentions so to do."
The Archbishop also spoke of the contrast between the bail outs being proposed for banks and the lack of funding for the Millennium Development Goals which are due to be discussed at the United Nations tomorrow.
Dr. Sentamu said: "Tomorrow morning I will attend a meeting to launch a campaign of 'Education for All' as part of the global effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, including the eradication of global poverty by 2015. Of course for such a target to be achieved there needs to be stable financial systems. There needs to be stable financial systems. Without a solid global economic base to work from, the eradication of world poverty would be an even greater task. But as one columnist recently noted, "the President of the United States recently announced a $700 billion bailout plans for banks and financial institutions. One of the ironies about this financial crisis is that it makes action on poverty look utterly achievable. It would cost $5 billion to save six million children's lives. World leaders could find 140 times that amount for the banking system in a week. How can they now tell us that action for the poorest on the planet is too expensive?"
Dr. Sentamu also drew attention to the plight of those outside the financial industry who would benefit from Government assistance at a time of need, highlighting the case of one particular farmer in North Yorkshire:
"Let me tell you about Richard, a Yorkshire farmer I know, who specialises in potato farming. He also grows wheat. We may have not enjoyed the wet summer, but it has proved disastrous for Richard and many other farmers, many of whom have lost about a third of their earnings. The harvest is late, there is a huge cost in drying out the crops, and sowing for next season is late.
In this current situation I hope that the government responds to the call from the Rural Advocate to bring forward payment of subsidies.
If they can find $700 billion to support the market, will the Government - and bankers – help bail out our farmers? Farmers are facing ruin not because of bad investment, or speculation. Can we help secure the vital food security they provide?"
The Archbishop ended his speech with an appeal for the "Deposit the Difference" scheme launched recently by the Global Exchange for Social Investment:
"The world's poor are waiting. And there is something that you can do to help. In fact it's something everyone can do to help. What is it? - It's 'Topping Up for the world's poor", giving a little with every transaction to a scheme called Deposit the Difference.... imagine that every time you bought something, you could arrange to top up your bills by a few pennies to the nearest pound above, and deposit the difference into a fund for educating the poor children of the world. Then imagine that each month you could arrange that any spare pence above the last pound of your total salaries be taken off and you could deposit the difference in the same fund. Next, imagine that your example was taken up by everyone in the country – and that together we could help ensure that all those extra pennies could be channelled into areas of need – especially into Education and Health for the word's poor."
참고: GEXSI(the Global Exchange for Social Investment:)
