Moneychangers in the temple (shock! horror!.)

[dianeduane]

Oh dear. Yesterday the Archbishops of Canterbury and York condemned London-based brokers who indulged in short selling as "bank robbers and asset strippers" and accused them of "generating unimaginable wealth ... by equally unimaginable levels of fiction".

But now it turns out that the Church of England has been quite willing to sell short and hedge currencies when doing so suited its purposes.

Tsk, tsk. Looks like the fiction isn't entirely localized. (Someone will mention "whited sepulchres" fairly soon, I'm sure.) These guys should really find out what their financial managers are doing before issuing these pronouncements.

(A Pythonesque touch here: the FT also reports that the CoE "[has] £5.6bn under management, mostly in a mix of equity, property and vast tracts of land.")

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Oh dear indeed. Just because the right reverend idiots have been caught out, though, doesn't mean they're wrong in what they say. "Short selling is the pursuit of truth"? Do me a favour.

It's unfortunately a common response to hypocrisy of this kind to say that it invalidates what the hypocrite says, rather than the fact of him saying it.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

No argument there. But it would make their arguments that much more persuasive if their own (ecclesiastical-corporate) noses were clean when they said things like this.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Apparently Whittam-Smith, mentioned in the third article, is also chairman of the Financial Ombudsman Service. So if the church's "customers" decide they don't like the way the church has been doing business, he could find himself in an interesting position...

[saskia139.livejournal.com]

Dorothy Sayers was right back in the 1930s when she pointed out that the identification of "sin" with sexual misconduct, and the obliviating of the other six deadly sins, was going to cause problems. And boy, it has.

[zenfrodo.livejournal.com]

*HEAVES that first stone*

[megotelek.livejournal.com]

Hee...

"But I want the girl that I marry to have a certain...special...something --"
"Cut that out!"

And talk about the right hand not knowing what the left is doing...*facepalm*