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A leading financial expert is backing the Vatican’s proposal for a global financial authority.
“It is right for the Vatican to set out a marker of how the world should and perhaps sometime could be,” Edward Hadas remarked to CNA.
Hadas’ comments follow the Oct. 24 publication of a 20-page document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace advocating a new global authority which, it hopes, can make economic decisions based on the international common good rather than individual national interest.
“Some American students of the Vatican see a great split between Left and Right, but this document does not suffer from that tension,” said Hadas.
He views the document as having a “consistent view” in suggesting that “the world needs a stronger political order, a more ethical orientation in government and a global economy which is consciously and globally organized to serve the human good.”
At the same time, Hadas believes it also encourages “the exercise of human freedom” but discourages “authoritarian control.”
Hadas teaches political and social philosophy at the Maryvale Institute in Birmingham, England. He is also the Economic Editor at Reuters Breakingviews, where he won the Business Journalist of the Year Award for economics in 2009. Prior to becoming a journalist in 2004, he worked for 25 years as a financial analyst for various firms, including Morgan Stanley.
The biggest problem for the pontifical council’s plan is the “real tension” between “practicable policies and idealistic aspirations,” he said.
Hadas noted that while the G20 countries have already considered a financial transaction tax and new rules on investment banking, “much of the rest” in the Vatican proposal, “while attractive and theologically sound, seems distant from the thinking of world leaders.”
Nevertheless, he sees the good in the Vatican laying out a proposal for how the world could be, especially since “there may come a time—after another crisis or in some moment of reflection—when this advice will seem useful as well as hopeful.”
