Archbishop of Canterbury: Bankers Have Failed to Repent

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has said that bankers have failed to repent for the financial crisis.

Dr Williams said: “There hasn’t been a feeling of closure about what happened last year. There hasn’t been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven’t heard people saying ‘well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty’.”
Asked if the City was returning to business as usual he said: “I worry. I feel that’s precisely what I call the ‘lack of closure’ coming home to roost. It’s a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year ‘idolatry’, that projecting of reality and substance onto things that don’t have them.”

Dr. Williams has already shown himself to be economically illiterate (“Every transaction in the developed economies of the West can be interpreted as an act of aggression against the economic losers in the worldwide game”), but this last statement is truly bizarre. More importantly, it has zero understanding of the credit crisis. As Oliver Kamm points out: “You could have saints and archangels trading derivatives, but if their risk models are wrong then you’ll get the same result.”

Posted by on September 16th, 2009 at 10:31 am


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