As the royal commission prepared to resume its hearings into financial services the Vatican released Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones (OPQ), a clunkily translated document (reviewed here in detail), on the ethics of markets.
Although written quite independently, passages of the document could have been mistaken for factual reporting of the royal commission. It speaks, for example, of financial advisers:
'Among the morally questionable activities of financial advisers in the management of savings, the following are to be taken into account: an excessive movement of the investment portfolio commonly aimed at increasing the revenues deriving from the commission for the bank or other financial intermediary; a failure from a due impartiality in offering instruments of saving, which, compared with some banks, the product of others would suit better the needs of the clients; the scarcity of an adequate diligence or even a malicious negligence on the part of financial advisers regarding the protection of related interests to the portfolio of their clients; and the concession of financing on the part of the banking intermediator in a subordinate manner to the contextual subscription of other financial products issued by the same, but not convenient to the client.'
The significance of this and other judgments of OPQ is precisely that they are not descriptions of individual crimes but flow logically from a defective understanding of the economy shared by its actors. They are not aberrations but natural consequences of a shared ideology.
The naivety of conventional economic wisdom, in the view of OPQ, is that it regards economics as a science independent of ethics. It abstracts economic transactions from their full human context, seeing them simply as directed to profit-making by competitive individuals. It holds that a market as free as possible from regulation will benefit society as a whole.
OPQ sees a sophisticated market as beneficial to society provided that it is seen as composed by human decisions and so serves human goals that go far beyond individual wealth making. Money is a means not an end. The market will serve society as a whole only if it is governed by ethical reflection:
'In principle, all the endowments and means that the markets employ in order to strengthen their distributive capacity are morally permissible, provided they do not turn against the dignity of the person and are not indifferent to the common good.
"In each of these areas, OPQ focuses on the human qualities that should be reflected in