The Financial Times carries this tidbit:
“Market freedom has become an absolute, a kind of fundamentalist religion in itself,” Dr John Sentamu said, the Archbishop of York, adding: “You know the joke about how many economists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is: ‘None. The market will sort it out.”
But not everyone in England considers the criticisms of western financial systems by the Archbishops of and York and Canterbury a laughing matter, especially since the Church of England has benefitted from short selling, a practice that Sentamu lambasted in a speech last week.
Again, The Financial Times has the story:
The Church of England faced charges of hypocrisy yesterday over its leaders’ attack on short selling and debt trading after hedge funds pointed out that it uses some of the same practices when investing its own assets.
Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church, said it was right to ban short selling, while John Sentamu, archbishop of York, called traders who cashed in on falling prices “bank robbers and asset strippers”.
Hedge funds pointed to the willingness of the church commissioners to lend foreign stock from their £5.5bn ($10.2bn) of investments – an essential support for short selling – and derided the pair for not understanding shorting. “They are trying to shoot the messenger and . . . deflecting attention away from the dramatic incompetence of bank executives,” said Hugh Hendry, of hedge fund Eclectica Asset Management. “Short selling is the pursuit of truth.”
The Washington Post says the archbishops’ criticisms are part of a larger debate about greed fueled by the fall of some “flamboyant financiers.”
Perhaps, but one still wishes that they were better informed.
Bishop Alan Wilson and Bishop Pierre Whalon do an excellent job in demonstrating that Archbishop Williams’ comment about Marx was misconstrued (seemingly deliberately) by the media, but Giles Fraser’s column in Church Times points out the weakness of Archbishop Sentamu’s argument about short selling–without naming any names.