Quantitative easing has dubious effects

WE obviously have to try our best to broaden and deepen our culture all our life. While we may have a concrete field of specialization, we should not forget that we need to connect with everyone else. Thus, we need to know them as best we could, including their interests, concerns, challenges, everything…

As priest, I normally stick to things spiritual and moral, but that does not prevent me from learning things about economics, business, politics, arts, etc. I know that things spiritual and moral are played out in these fields of human affairs. So, I need to have at least some working knowledge of this earthly culture.

Like everybody else, I certainly have to know how to blend them well. There are rules to follow, deriving mainly from the position one occupies in society. But everyone needs to contribute to the common good, giving what is peculiar to him so that the common culture be enriched.

Besides, with the way the world is developing these days, it’s getting clear that the way to go is to cultivate an interdisciplinary approach to knowing and learning. And so, we just have to plunge into this path of interactive methods, now facilitated by our developing networking services. This is our world now!

Having said all that, I just would like to voice out my concern at what is happening in the big and high places in developed countries where officials are talking about the so-called “quantitative easing,” (QE) now being touted to solve the deepening and widening economic crisis worldwide.

From what I could understand about it, it involves pumping money into the economy in the hope of jump-starting it into a productive frenzy of activity. It seems money would be created “ex nihilo,” from nothing, just to trigger productivity.

While there is some wisdom to that idea, I feel that its effectiveness would depend on a number of factors. Obviously, simply giving out money does not automatically produce good economic results. Otherwise, we would have done this thing long time ago.

Economists and other social leaders point to the following requirements for QE to work: sound governance, sound economic policies, sound monetary policies, sound commercial policies, etc. The list is endless.

As we can see, there are many conditions before QE can achieve its goal. What does all this tell us? That our world economic crisis just cannot be solved solely by economic remedies. There is a lot more that is needed than just talking about QE, which happens to be Obama’s main problem solver.

You can print all the money you want and throw them away to the people from a helicopter. But if the people would not know how to use them, how to make them productive, you would just be multiplying problems.

That seems to be the sentiment of the American people who booted out many of Obama’s people in Congress in the midterm elections. They seem to say that the US is heading in the wrong direction. Time to change course.

This sentiment seems to be shared also by a good number of leaders from other countries. In Obama’s recent trip to India and other Asian countries, the message given to him was unmistakable.

It must be understood that whatever benefit and advantage QE gives, it is meant only to solve a small part of the crisis, one meant only for an emergency situation that has to be resolved as quickly as possible. If that fails, then death naturally comes, and we just have to accept the unavoidable fact.

But beyond QE’s economic wisdom, what we should realize more deeply is that our economic predicament has deeper spiritual and moral causes. When people are spoiled with entitlements and have developed a complacent mind-frame, QE would not be effective. There has to be a spiritual and moral overhaul.

We have to tackle the bull by the horn. Our leaders should not just be competent politically, economically, etc., but should also be adept in the spiritual and moral considerations. They would be fatally handicapped if this fundamental requirement is not meant.

Enough with the myth that the world’s problems can be just be handled by merely playing politics and business. The crisis we are having now is a painful rousing from our blindness. It is actually showing us the way we ought to take.

Instead of casting aspersions on each other because of our respective roles as clergy and lay, let’s work together to attain not only our temporal common good but the eternal one as well.