Many Americans can’t remember anything other than an economy with skyrocketing inequality, in which living standards for most Americans are stagnating and the rich are pulling away. It feels inevitable.
But it’s not.
A well-known team of inequality researchers — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — has been getting some attention recently for a chart it produced. It shows the change in income between 1980 and 2014 for every point on the distribution, and it neatly summarizes the recent soaring of inequality.
It seems counterintuitive, but every time you hear about a financial scandal in the Vatican, that is good news, not bad. It is good news because it shows — to quote the Vatican’s financial watchdog — that the regulatory system is working.
For too long, the church has been racked by financial mismanagement. Now, some will say the basic problem is that clerics shouldn’t be put in charge of finances. Because their training is in theology, they lack either the training or the interest in finances to develop the expertise necessary to run multimillion-dollar, multinational organizations and are too easily compromised by incompetent but devout lay advisers or duped by those with nefarious intent.
Read more at National Catholic Reporter.
A New York woman who wants to become a nun has been told she’ll have to wait to take her vows until she pays off her student loans.
Alida Taylor, 28, told New York’s CBS2 that her desire to become a nun happened after she graduated from the University of Louisiana, moved to New York and took a job with a Broadway costume designer.
Read more at Yahoo Finance.
It is now impossible to launder money at the Vatican bank, its chairman said upon release of an annual report showing 4,935 accounts that had been closed between June 2013 and December 2015. Jean-Baptiste de Franssu explained that the Vatican bank, known as the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), has tightened its rules to stop people using the institution to dodge taxes or hide their ill-gotten gains.
Read more at The Tablet.
As the financial-services industry works to digest the Labor Department’s new fiduciary-duty rule—requiring advisers making recommendations on retirement accounts to act in their clients’ best interests—financial advisers have many questions about how the new standard will affect the way they do business.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
The Vatican suspended an audit of its finances by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a decision sources said was taken to determine if there were irregularities in the contract.
Read more at Reuters.
AS HE unveiled an extensive shake-up of the Vatican’s financial structures on July 9th, Cardinal George Pell said Pope Francis would soon name an auditor-general, free to “go everywhere and anywhere” in the walled city-state to root out pecuniary lapses. The appointment of the new official would help the Vatican work towards “transcendency”, the cardinal added, before correcting himself to say “transparency”.
By Josephine McKenna
First, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck labeled Pope Francis a Marxist. Now, The Economist is accusing him of following Vladimir Lenin.
The respected financial magazine accused the pope of following the founder of Soviet communism in adopting an “ultra radical line” on capitalism.
In a blog entry titled “Francis, capitalism and war: The pope’s divisions,” the British weekly questioned aspects of a wide-ranging interview the pontiff recently gave to the Spanish daily La Vanguardia.
By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — When Pope Francis condemns a “cult of money” and the “dictatorship” of a faceless economy, he isn’t trying to damper entrepreneurial spirit or shutter business.
What entrepreneurs and leaders need, he has emphasized, is having a proper relationship with wealth — that their money serve, not enslave.
Given the pope’s call for a more ethical economy of inclusion, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Catholic Relief Services and the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business held a two-day conference in mid-June to look at how financial markets could respond.
Read more at the Catholic New Service
By Allister Heath
There can be no doubt that Pope Francis is a devoted and selfless man who has dedicated his life to serving others. A phenomenal theologian, he abhors war and poverty and is an inspiration to hundreds of millions of believers; he has gained widespread respect even among those who disagree with the Roman Catholic church’s teachings.
So it is with great sadness that I must take exception to the Pope’s views on economics and business. His hostility to capitalism, shared by the Church of England, is tragically misplaced. He has repeatedly savaged free markets, most recently at a Vatican conference this week, and aligned himself with the views of Thomas Piketty, the far-Left intellectual who obsesses about inequality and advocates crippling taxes on income and wealth.
The Catholic Finance Association
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