The Spectator

From the archives: Rowan Williams on capitalism and idolatry

To mark today’s news that Rowan Williams will be stepping down as Archbishop of Canterbury, here’s a piece he wrote for The Spectator during the financial crash of 2008:

Rowan Williams, Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism, 24 September 2008

Readers of Anthony Trollope will remember how thoughtless and greedy young men in the Victorian professions can be lured into ruin by accepting ‘accommodation bills’ from their shifty acquaintances. They make themselves liable for the debts of others; and only too late do they discover that they are trapped in a web of financial mechanics that forces them to pay hugely inflated sums for obligations or services they have had nothing to do with. Their own individual credit-worthiness, their own circumstances, even their own personal choices are all irrelevant: the debt has acquired a life of its own, quite independent of any real transaction they are involved in.

A prescient student of Trollope would have seen that he is identifying an endemic feature of the world of borrowing and lending. A lender takes a calculated risk in offering the use of their money to someone else, and rates of interests express the recognition of this — and the rewards that may be secured for taking such a risk. But it is not too difficult to see how the notional gain involved here can be used as security against a further risk. And so the transaction moves further and further from the original transaction with its realistic assessment of levels of risk within the context of measurable standards of credit-worthiness. Any face-to-face element, any direct calculation of what and who is reasonably worth trusting (which assumes some common frame of reference), fades away. Like Trollope’s hapless young clerics and feckless young landowners, individuals find that their own personal financial decisions and calculations have nothing to do with what is happening to their resources, in a process for which a debt is simply someone else’s wholly disposable asset.

It is a sort of one-syllable nursery parable of what the last couple of weeks have illustrated in the world of global finance and, of course, a reminder that what we have been witnessing is not just the product of a couple of irresponsible decades.

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