Curing the global economy

It is now beyond all doubt. The global patient is seriously ill. Many experts say the incubation period has been a long time, a matter of months if not years. What has caused the illness? Part of the blame must lie at the door of private individuals as well as banks and corporations. Self-indulgent orgies of irresponsible lending, borrowing and speculative property-dealing have severely weakened the immune system of the global economy.

What is the cure? Financial leaders such as Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and Jean-Claude Trichet, Chairman of the European Central Bank and political leaders such as Gordon Brown, the UK premier are attempting to cure the patient, but without much success so far.

So the disease continues to spread from the banks to the High Street. And not only spread, but also mutate. First, there were fears for the patient's temperature: just after a few months the pulse rate for oil quickened beyond measure, to reach the unprecedented height of $150 just a few months ago. World commodity prices suffered similar severe bouts of inflation.

Now the illness has changed tack yet again: the most recent prognosis is galloping deflation and recession as demand falls everywhere. Central bankers prescribe increasingly lower rates of interest, and governments look for ways to stimulate the patient's health through swingeing tax cuts and exhortations to spend more. But all these remedies come with a health warning: avoid reckless debt and unsecured loans at all costs.

Will the medicine work? And how long will the patient take to get well again? The best medical professionals humbly acknowledge that the treatments they offer are only catalysts, however, decisive, not the cure themselves. Much depends on the patient's frame of mind and emotional state.

The vital ingredient is a generous dose of positive thinking. Widespread optimism is the indispenasable placebo that will ultimately halt a current vicious downward spiral for the giant that is the global economy.

Lo que se ve desde el aeropuerto

Hace pocos días estuve en el aeropuerto. Llegué acompañado y, con el corazón ilusionado, me quedé allí sólo, en silencio, bajo la lluvia, observando cómo el avión cargado de todo mi afecto se difuminaba entre las nubes. No, no es que lo hubiera perdido... Pero tampoco podía tomarlo... por lo menos en esa ocasión.

Los aeropuertos son lugares muy especiales donde cientos de historias tienen lugar a la vez: la pareja que se besa junto a la puerta de embarque creando un universo propio a su alrededor; la gente comprando el periódico o la chocolatina de última hora antes de embarcar; el grupo de desconocidos observando las pantallas y comentando los horarios; el cachorro moviendo su rabo emocionado ante la llegada de su ama; los niños y las niñas con las camisetas del equipo de fútbol local, el grupo de gente junto a la barrera que separa la puerta de embarque de la zona común...

Alegrías y tristezas se mezclan simultaneamente y de forma organizada entre el tumulto de gente. Ilusiones y añoranzas se escriben en un mismo lugar, junto a los sueños de la próxima visita al aeropuerto, cuando se cogerá un avión o esperará una llegada.

Lo que se ve desde el aeropuerto, no, mejor lo que se 'siente' en el aeropuerto, son EMOCIONES y SENTIMIENTOS.

The reporting of the financial crisis has highlighted the need for a much greater awareness of how people behave with money, and I don't just mean the ones who have it.

Warren Buffett, one of the world's richest men, hits the nail on the head when he says there are two motives that drive investors: greed and fear. He goes on to add that he's fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.

It's all very well for experts like Warren Buffett, to express their incisive understanding of how people behave when they invest their money. But it's another thing when we hear that hundreds, if not thousands of investors, sell their investments at their cheapest, and shun the world's stock markets when they are at an all-time low. The man whose wife lay across the entrance to one of the UK's better-known building societies until the bank handed over their £1,000,000 of savings is both tragic and comic. The fact that hundreds of retail businesses sell a large proportion of their stock on credit at vastly inflated prices to customers who can ill afford them. All these are examples not only of how irrational people behave with money, but, and this is more significant, how downright ignorant so many people are about handling money, lending it, borrowing it, spending it, and the difference between saving it and investing it.

As a person who found school maths a real torment because I couldn't for the life of me see its relevance, I think there is now an extremely urgent case for teaching the basic principles of financial management to all our school students. Like sex, long gone are the days when it wasn't quite respectable to talk about it. What the AIDS crisis did for sex education, I guess the credit crunch could do for a potential worldwide project to promote financial education in schools.

In the case of AIDS the world saw itself staring into the abyss of a global pandemic. In the case of fthe financial crisis, the future of the world economic system and our material well-being is at stake.

I see that the Vatican is going to introduce sexual screening for seminarians. Men who show 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies' will be barred from proceeding to ordination as priests. There have already been predictable criticisms from the gay lobby and elsewhere.The motive for the Church's latest move must partly at least be gesture politics to show the world that it's seriously trying to do something positive about wayward priests.

Personally, I can not see how any gay man in his right mind would want nowadays to become a salaried employee of an organisation which deals so harshly with any dissent from orthodoxy within its ranks. A gay man owes it to his own mental health to express his vocation in ways that are more likely to lead to a flowering of his God-given talents and gifts of personality. And paradoxically, such a screening process should help would-be candidates for the priesthood as much as the barque of Peter itself.

But I must confess I am puzzled about the proposed screening process. How will it operate in practice? Is it really so easy to 'weed out' seminarians who, according to the guidelines published by the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education, show signs of 'grave immaturity', or 'instability of personality, 'strong affective dependencies, lack of freedom in relations; excessive rigidity of character; lack of loyalty; uncertain sexal identity; deep-seated homosexual tendencies, etc." If this be the case, God help us all!

Psychological development just ain't that simple. It's a bit like the driving test. You can be a super-safer driver in your early twenties. But an absolutely menace on the roads by the time you hit fifty. I guess it might be a bit the same with Catholic priests. Perhaps they should be screened every five years or so throughout their ministry?

Certainly the Church should collaborate with psycholgists and explore the negative effects of the highly contentious requirement for compulsory celibacy. Fresh thinking is badly needed here. In the meantime, perhaps the Church could be a little bit less averse to accepting into its bosom people in their humanity, diversity and brokenness, and be more intent on its real business of helping them to grow, however faltingly, towards ever greater holiness of life.