IN the face of the financial catastrophe currently rocking the US and threatening to spill all over, we need to stay sober and restrain ourselves from making knee-jerk reactions that can only hit more panic buttons.

What we need is to try to rebuild an atmosphere of trust in the business world. This is the urgent call today!

In fact, we need to pray, since after all is said and done, the whole affair certainly has deep spiritual and moral roots that can only be properly handled when spiritual and supernatural means are also used.

We cannot deny the fact that even if there are specific people and sectors who ought to get the bigger part of the blame, we somehow are all involved. Yes, all of us, even if we are not quite familiar with the dynamics of the disaster.

This is because of the growing globalization that affects not only the warming of our planet, still a debatable topic, but also our business and politics.

As in, I might buy a simple pair of shoes in Colon (Cebu City), but that purchase can have some effect in America’s Wall Street. Just don’t ask me to explain the connection, but a certain link, no matter how remote, there must be!

If we want to lighten up a bit, we can choose to indulge in humoring ourselves with some amusing developments. Like, it is reported that Iceland may have to go back to fishing because of it.

With that country’s $60K per capita income compared to ours that crawls in the vicinity of the first thousand or so dollars, we can just imagine what’s going to happen to us. We have to brace ourselves to go back to planting “camote.”

The only saving factor may be that since we are short of money always, we could not participate much in the problem that has just erupted. So the effects on us may not be that much either.

I learned, for example, that the average American keeps 13 credit cards. I don’t know how many credit cards the average Filipino has. I myself don’t have any. And most of those I know who have, have trouble repaying for their purchases.

I guess this is the time to reprise St. Paul’s experience: “I know both how to be brought low and I know how to abound, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all these things in him who strengthens me.” (Phil 4,12-13)

Yes, dear, whether we are going back to fishing or to planting “camote,” we who still are Christian believers need to go back always to Christ. We can talk economics till death, to see what’s wrong and what can be done, but we cannot neglect to pray. That would be criminal!

Of course, many Third World countries, which have been recipients of not-so-kind prescriptions from US business leaders about how to run their business, are now having a heyday LOLing at their supposedly bright counterparts.

It’s said that the American economic models were really the best ones that came out of the minds of their top economists. They were supposed to work 99% of the time. What happened was that the imponderable 1% occurred.

There’s the rub! These economic models, with all the sophisticated math and econometrics put into them, simply cannot capture certain elements also present in business as a human activity. It’s not in their DNA.

These are the elements of human freedom, of intentions and personal integrity, of values like prudence, poverty, temperance, justice, that cannot be quantified, because they are spiritual.

In fact, some knowledgeable quarters claim these models were driven by greed as main motive. People are losing the taste for simple living. It should be no wonder these models collapse at a certain point.

Again the saving grace of the American system is that it is based on the democratic way of life and the free-enterprise way of doing business. It has better built-in mechanisms to correct itself than what can be found, for example, in a socialist state or a government-controlled economy.

The current crisis is a painful lesson for the Americans to imbue their capitalism with true human values. For Christian believers, these values are the ones taught by Christ, and now by the social doctrine of the Church.