Business
Items related to the worlds of commerce and markets
A Task Before Him
Wed 05 Nov 2008 by Al Sikes
Formidable Challenges, but Joined by Lincoln’s Legacy
Trinity Forum Chairman Al Sikes reflects on the legacy and challenges facing the new President-Elect.
The Global Culture of Debt
Fri 31 Oct 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Prabhu Guptara
This essay is adapted from a presentation to the Bettag Konferenz of the EVP (Evangelical People’s Party of Switzerland), 20 September 2008. We are publishing it as background material for the Provocations short piece adapted from Professor Guptara’s lecture on “The Institutionalization of Greed”.
The Institutionalization of Greed
Wed 22 Oct 2008 • Responses: 3 • by Prabhu Guptara
Excerpts from a Trinity Forum Conversation
“As a culture shifts from being focused on tradition or society or God to being focused on money, then the kinds of problems we have had over the past few years are only to be expected.”
A New Bretton Woods for the New Millennium?
Tue 21 Oct 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
The global financial crisis, now into its second month as a factor in everyone’s consciousness, has done more than change the dynamics of the current U.S. presidential election. In the U.S. it has shifted the balance, even if only slightly, to Senator Barack Obama. This is because Democratic politicians are generally associated with big government, and many Americans at a time of national financial anxiety instinctively feel that the best thing that can bail them out of trouble is government. But globally, there may be a far more important tectonic shift taking place. This is the sense that global economic leadership may now be transferring itself to the European Union, the 27-member economic confederation of European states.
Overwhelmed by Culture
Tue 14 Oct 2008 by Al Sikes
It’s not a money crisis. It’s a character crisis.
Trinity Forum Chairman Al Sikes looks at the economic crisis as a teachable moment. It’s time again to address our higher responsibility.
The Financial Tsunami
Mon 29 Sep 2008 by David Aikman
“We are in the midst of a serious financial crisis,” President Bush told the American people in a televised national address on September 24. The “entire economy” of the U.S. was in danger, he explained; the market was “not functioning properly, and “more banks could fail.” Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a few days earlier had described the crisis as a “once-a-century” phenomenon and the worst he had ever seen. Others referred to the meltdown on Wall Street as a financial “tsunami” that could overwhelm all regular economic activity in the U.S. and create not just a recession but an economic depression not seen in the U.S. or the world since the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of October 1929.
Forgive Us Our Debts
Thu 18 Sep 2008 • Responses: 2 • by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
Toward a Proper Understanding of Debt
Dr. Ted Malloch looks at debt at levels from the personal to the global. Debt has its place, but we now have a global culture of debt with no consideration for thrift.
Facing Up to Differences
Mon 14 Jul 2008 by Fred Harburg
The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It, by Os Guinness (HarperOne, 2008), cloth, 224 pages, $23.95.
Os Guinness opens his richly packed book, The Case for Civility, with the bleak assessment that “It would be a safe but sad bet that someone, somewhere in the world, is killing someone else at this very moment in the name of religion or ideology.”
In 1949, as the 7-year-old son of an Irish missionary in Nanking, China, Os received his first, and life-changing, lesson on the politics of “civility”—or the lack thereof—when his family was caught up in the Maoist Revolution. (Although Os was spirited out of the country by fellow missionaries, his parents were not allowed to flee until three years later.) In this experience he learned what it means to be “different” in a very personal way. Building on this experience, he writes, “How we live with our deepest differences is a question that lives at the heart of American freedom, and soon it may be a matter of survival for the planet” (19).
Steep Trajectory
Wed 07 May 2008 by Al Sikes
Free Lunch Writ Large
We are deep in the blame game over the housing bubble, writes Al Sikes. Mortgage brokers, banks, rating agencies, property flippers, and regulators have all made the list. Perhaps somebody should go upstream in a search for the real culprit.
The Bigger Picture
Mon 31 Mar 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Gary Moore
In the current financial climate, perspective is a critical attribute of leadership.
During the early nineties, the media, both secular and religious, convinced a large percentage of Americans that our $5 trillion federal debt was of earth-shaking proportions. (They did much the same in the late nineties during Y2K.) As Americans were living on about $25,000 on average in 1990, it is easy to see how that $5 trillion number could look like a giant in the promised land. And most people were quite surprised when I told them the White House had actually estimated that America’s net worth, after subtracting all debts owed to foreigners, was $66.4 trillion in 1990.
