“… 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.”
Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Ethics, Economics and Global Justice, a speech he gave over the weeknd in Cardiff

And from the Financial Times:

“But the brutal truth is that until financial markets live up to their name – becoming places where assets are traded and priced in a credible manner – it will be difficult to rebuild investor trust. Not for nothing does the root of the word “credit” come from the Latin credere, meaning “to believe”.
“The past year has shown that without faith, finance is worth naught. Rebuilding the sense of trust could take rather longer than that.”

Gillian Tett in the FT ‘s series on the Future of Capitalism

The Archbishop’s speech is a long with, with several interesting citations and a very nuanced presentation that has been lost on some commentators, like Andrew Brown at The Guardian. Brown picked on a somewhat convoluted sentence about outsourcing but skipped over the preceeding sentence which argued that send jobs off-shore hurts the local economy of the sending nation but also can harm the nation where the work is transferred because it is essentially foreign work which doesn’t build the local or national economy except through providing salaries.  Rowan suggests it might take antitrust action against he multinationals which move the jobs around with little concern for the local communities on either end of the relocation. Now is that so hard to understand?

The Archbishop’s entire speech is worth reading, but only when you have at least half an hour for it.

Filed under: Technology